A couple times a week, I hear someone remark “It is what it is,” accompanied by a weary sigh. I always puzzle over the expression a little bit, th

How to use repetition

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2023-06-04 08:00:06

A couple times a week, I hear someone remark “It is what it is,” accompanied by a weary sigh. I always puzzle over the expression a little bit, thinking What else could it be? “It is what it is” is a literal tautology, an apparently needless repetition intended to convey something more. Overused, it has become a cliché, reflecting a too-easy acceptance of bad situations.

“It is what it is” is not alone. Tautologies abound, from “What will be will be” (and the Spanish version “Que será será”) to the assertive “I am what I am” (and the Biblical “I am that I am” translating the Hebrew Ehyeh asher ehyeh). There’s Yogi Berra’s “It ain’t over till it’s over.” And there’s “A man got to do what a man got to do” from The Grapes of Wrath, later morphed to “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

These clausal tautologies often share a grammatical form: the subject-predicate pair is repeated within the subject (“What will be will be”, “A man got to do what a man got to do”) or within the predicate (“It is what it is”, “I am what I am”). By stating the obvious in an obvious way, such expressions force us to look beyond the literal for meaning. Hearers infer inevitability and acceptance or, in some instances, hope and grit.