411 REFERENCE · Wiktionary
Safire
Reference material by Wiktionary contributors. This retains its source identity and is not 411 news reporting.
English
Proper noun
en.
en 2023-09-12 McWhorter John What Is 'It Is What It Is'? w:New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/opinion/it-is-what-it-is.html 2023-09-13 I even discovered in writing this newsletter that my colleague Frank Bruni had taken the phrase to task last year (“the most degrading sequence of five words in the English language”) and William Safire had commented on it in The Times all the way back in 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20231102074416/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/opinion/it-is-what-it-is.html