"It Is What It Is."

"It Is What It Is" has long been high on the list of phrases that get on my nerves.

The reason, I think, is its combination of an air of

1. Pseudo-profundity (the repetitiveness, the circularity that leaves us right exactly where we started in the manner that impresses the gullible with utter meaninglessness) with

2. Callous dismissiveness passed off as tough-minded "realism."

This is the way the world is, they tell you, deal with it or don't, I don't care--with the "I don't care" the part that matters most.

It is a myth that the Inuit have fifty words for snow--but we seem to have fifty thousand ways of telling people right to their faces that we don't care about their problems, or about them, and the richness of our vocabulary in that particular area of communication would seem to me to say a great deal about us.