If you’re speaking with John McWhorter, never use this common phrase: “It is what it is.”
“People say it when, really, what they mean is, ‘I don’t care,” McWhorter, an author, linguist and associate professor at Columbia University, told Bill Gates’ “Unconfuse Me” podcast on Thursday.
“The first time someone said that to me was when something unpleasant had happened to me, and he didn’t care. And he said, ‘Well, it is what it is,'” McWhorter said. “And I parsed it and I thought, ‘What a gorgeously chilly way of saying: Your problems don’t matter to me.'”
You’ve probably heard the phrase before, or even used it yourself — typically in response to a problem or situation that can’t be fixed or remedied, and therefore just has to be accepted. But it can come across as so passive that using it can erode other people’s trust in you, as McWhorter noted.
Approximately 46.5 million U.S. adults (18%) say they have either one person or nobody that they can confide in for personal support, according to a 2021 poll from The Impact Genome Project and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Trust comes from people knowing “that you have their back, that they’re supported by you and that your support isn’t going to be used for exploitation later,” leadership advisor Yasmene Mumby told CNBC Make It in May. “Go in [to conversations] utilizing your deep, inquiry-based listening. That’s what I would do.”
It’s not entirely bad news for McWhorter’s least-favorite phrase: Using it can be a sign of emotional resilience, because it shows your ability to accept your circumstances, psychologist Cortney Warren told Make It last month.
“The key to resilience is not denying reality or seeking out a reason that makes us feel better about why something happened,” Warren said. “When we arrive at a place of radical acceptance, the situation has less power over us.”
Still, she suggested some alternate wording to use: “I have to see reality for what it is, even if it’s not what I want, so I can move forward.”
That’s a much longer sentence, but it includes enough context to avoid coming across as dismissive — or, as grammar experts Kathy and Ross Petras told Make It in 2021, “embarrassingly cliched.”
As for the expression, “It is what it is?”
“It should leave,” said McWhorter.
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