Over the past four months or so, I think I have heard the phrase “to your point” or “to so-and-so’s point” as an introductory clause more than at any other point in my life. I even heard Alexi Lalas use it on ESPN in discussing soccer. When did this phrase become a standard-issue conversational crutch?
I dislike it because it seems that if we are having a conversation, and if you plan to depart from a point I just made, the burden is on you to indicate that we are switching gears. Otherwise, I will assume that whatever you say is “to my point.”
As for “it is what it is”…didn’t this begin as a malapropism, a phrase uttered by a coach or by Scott McClellan in a presser, and which subsequently underwent a makeover from idiotic statement to zen-like aphorism (like “they are who we thought they were” or Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”)?
Damn skippy it is what it is. How about you tell me when it starts being what it’s NOT?
Is there something secretly elegant or insightful about this statement that I’m not getting?
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