This Is What the Meaning of “Is Is” Is
The strange and fascinating conundrum of Is-Is-ification.
I’m sure Bill Clinton would prefer to be remembered for (almost) any quote other than the galaxy-brained baffler, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” from his grand jury testimony in 1998. But the phrase lives fully rent-free in my brain, especially when I think (as, troublingly, I often do) about the “Is Is” situation — what linguists (who, in a way that I find deeply charming, love to make very interesting things sound breathtakingly dull) call the “double copula.” The context, for those who don’t remember or would prefer to forget, was that the president had been asked to admit the falsehood of a statement by his attorney about an affidavit filed by Monica Lewinsky “that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.” Clinton’s point, from a grammatical perspective at least, is, well, unimpeachable (sorry): The use of the present indefinite “is” can imply a more or less permanent state of affairs or something that is currently ongoing and doesn’t necessarily stretch back into the past. “Is the Earth round?” Yes. “Is there any cake?” Well, no, but that’s because I ate the cake that once was for my tea.
But where that leaves us w/r/t the “Is Is” conundrum is precisely nowhere (again, sorry – 100% my fault for starting this where I started it). You’ll often hear “Is Is” in statements like the following:
“The thing is, is I ate the cake for my tea.”
“What I mean is, is that the Earth is round.”
“What I’d really like is, is for this grand jury to stop asking me questions about my affair.”
Lots of people use “Is Is” constructions, though it looks quite odd in a transcript. In keeping with our presidential theme, President Obama is a veritable connoisseur of the form, as is George W. Bush. Language Log has gone to the trouble of collecting a nice little library of Obama Is-Is-isms, but you can get the gist from just a couple. I find that it feels very natural and right hearing it in speech, but looks quite odd when written down.
“The bottom line, though, is, is that they’ve still got to meet those basic criteria.”
“We’ve made great strides in the coordination and cooperation between our two governments over the last several years … uh, but my suspicion is, is that things can be improved.”
But so what’s going on here? It sounds right, but it makes no grammatical sense at all. FWIW, there is a version of Is-Is-ification that is grammatically sound: When you say something like, “What the problem is is that you ate my cake for your tea,”1 the first part of the sentence is a dependent clause and the subject of the sentence, which you can make better sense of if you rearrange the sentence to be “That you ate my cake for your tea is what the problem is.” But that’s not what’s going on here!
So what is going on? Well, theories abound (linguists have been on the case since at least the ’80s). One notion is that the second “is” is doing a job that should rightfully have gone to a “that”2 (“the thing is [that] I ate the cake for my tea”). It’s nice and elegant, but it doesn’t make sense of the Is-is-isms that already have a “that” (like Obama’s “The bottom line is, is that they’ve still got to meet those criteria” above). Alternatively (or, I suppose, additionally), it might be a clue to the existence of a secret “what” that has been lurking in the shadows all along and whose miraculous reappearance would render the sentence grammatical: “[What] the thing is is that I ate the cake for my tea” scans just fine because you can reverse it — “That I ate the cake for my tea is what the thing is.” A third theory is that our funny little extra “is” is simply there as a signpost to alert listeners that the sentence is about to change direction or introduce surprising new information. I don’t like this theory primarily on the grounds that it is a snooze.
There is a unified theory of Is-Is-ification, which is that the parasite “is” is acting as a boundary between the introduction of a topic with a clause like “The fact is” and the promised commentary on the topic, like, “I’ve eaten too much cake” or, “I’ve done some decidedly unfortunate things in the Oval Office.”
I’ll leave you with two final thoughts: Firstly, there is such a thing as a “triple copula” (“The thing is, is, is …”), which I frankly don’t have the stamina to try to make sense of. And there’s also a variety of Was-Is-ification (“The thing was, is that the cake was extremely tasty”), though it doesn’t work the other way round (“The thing is, was”), which is interesting and kind of funny to think about. Now I’m off to go find some cake.
In case you didn’t believe me before about linguists’ insisting on making interesting things dull, this type of sentence is called, I kid you not, a wh-pseudocleft.
Not just any “that,” but a specific “that” called a complementizer, which sounds like it means it’s an obsequious brown-noser but which is in fact less interesting.
This is, is a terrific topic, and one that I was was waiting for for a long time. They do it with “was” too. (I snuck that double “for” in there in lieu of the briefer “eight”. Go figure.)
Truly fluent speakers such as Gore Vidal, or John LeCarré, don’t do this. It a nit that I trained myself not to pick, but recently I did actually see it in print. What it is, is a rhythmic glitch, and if people would form a sentence in their minds in advance, with the proper pauses they wouldn’t need to insert the extra beat.
“To be, or not to be, that is, is the question.”
Now, on word, to “like”. I recently heard an otherwise intelligent and interesting person use the word “like” 37 times in 60 seconds. I timed it. It’s become a plague.
Great work, thanks!
I don’t think I’ve ever really come across this. In the examples used I think I would just omit the second “is” and it would still make sense. It feels more like a verbal tick to me 🤷♀️