Its been a terrible year. I don’t even have to say that. I know it, you know it, and it’s pointless to go over the ways in which the year sucked. As I write this, I’m fighting another extended bout with my depression which has discouraged me from writing. But this being the end of the year, there’s one thing I want to hand out: The Acid Martini Award, which I use to celebrate egregious use and various abuses of the English language.
It’s a happy thing to report that Joe Biden won the election, so we’re not going to become the property of the Chinese and Russians. But even so, many, MANY people who voted for Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, are of the ilk that keeps telling us that everyone in the country needs to learn to speak English. Are they worried about someone stepping into the country and invading the land and infecting the language? Hm. But the fact is, they don’t have anything to worry about because THEY are the ones destroying English. Hell, their demagogue on Earth, Trump himself, is not exactly known for his sesquipedalian loquaciousness. Mr. Has-The-Best-Words has gotten by mainly by using only enough words to create a small paragraph. Immigrants should learn to speak English? Your bigoted ass needs to learn how to fucking speak it FIRST!
Thus, we managed to create a language full of unpleasant words and redundant phrases which are frequently exacerbated by a bunch of Nazis who dropped out of school in the third grade. The Acid Martini Award was created by none other than myself, named after the drink I would like to serve to anyone using certain words or phrases. I mean really, what’s worth trying to preserve about a terrible language? So before you start railing about how dem daggone Cajuns gonna kill English wit dat fancy-schmancy French, you need to learn to wash your own mouth out with soap if you get caught using this year’s phrase:
It Is What It Is
Yes, but what, exactly, fucking IS it? It is what it is has become the go-to phrase people use when they decide something can passively be written off. It is what it is says something is of no concern to me. It’s the passive-aggressive way of saying fuck you, why should I care? In short, it gets used to write off every major injustice seen – or possibly even committed – by the world’s Karens.
Yes, there have been many other ways of doing that before. But none of the others have ever carried the sense of privileged indifference that It Is What It Is seems to have. This is something you hear from rich white suburbanites telling you that everything is just fine as long as more room can be cleared out for their own exorbitant personal museums and other tributes to themselves. The sort of passivity heard in It Is What It Is resembles the same sort of defeat you hear from moderates. No, they can’t POSSIBLY be bad, but they’re just grateful their (token) minority friends aren’t like all the OTHERS! It Is What It Is has come to mean there’s contempt. Not HATE, but the sort of underlying contempt that says the person using it is trying to gaslight.
The Windy Nickel 