Tis doesn’t impress me as a terribly recent phrase, but over the past couple of months I’ve had the impression that I’ve heard this phrase way more frequently than ever before. I did just start working in a new place, so perhaps I am just being exposed to some individuals who use this phrase terribly frequently.
Any thoughts as to the history/origin of this phrase?
Sorry all - should have done my search first. Voted top cliche of 2004 indeed!
And here. I ran into difficulty in my SDMB search due to the short words involved.
Funny to see this because I was just thinking of that phrase this morning. It was used, with modern inflection, in an episode of Mad Men and it immediately struck me as anachronistic. I’m positive I didn’t hear the phrase when I was growing up and Mad Men is set even before that. The writer, Matt Weiner, is roughly my age so I’m surprised he let that in.
While I can’t recall specific instances of hearing it before, it did not impress me as a “new” phrase. But when I reported to work at this new place, I heard it used nearly daily by my #2. It is also used regularly by others in the office, undoubtedly as a result of his useage. AND - I’ve found it creeping into my own vocabulary - something I’m pretty confident I never said before.
Amazing - and irritating - how insidiously infectious a phrase like this can be.
First time I noticed it was Tony Soprano on “The Sopranos.” His character says it frequently. After that (confirmation bias alert!) I started noticing it more often.
What it is, is one of my favorite Adam Again songs: It Is What It Is (What It Is) (1992)
I don’t know who invented it, but the guy I think popularized the phrase most was, like Tony Soprano, a Joisey guy: Bill Parcells.
Presumably, Parcells was just using a phrase blue collar guys in New Jersey had been using for years. But as coach of the New York Giants, he helped turn the phrase into a sporting cliche.
When I first heard the phrase, I liked it. It meant, essentially, “Deal with the facts as they are, not as you’d like them to be.” The two main ramifications?
If a star player leaves the team, either via trade, free agency, retirement or injury, there’s no point in a coach using that as an excuse. Lawrence Taylor is missing a big upcoming game with a broken ankle? No hand-wringing! “It is what it is- we just have to plug someone else in and make it work.”
If a talented team loses several close games, and winds up with a 7-9 record, the coach doesn’t want to hear his players claim they were better than their record, and that with a few breaks, they’d have been 11-5 and in the playoffs. "The record is what it is, and if you’re 7-9, you’re a bad team that doesn’t deserve to be in the playoffs. "
But the phrase has been so overused as to become meaningless.
Amen.