Tautophrase coined by William Safire - The New York Times
Tautophrase
Tautophrase
It is what it is. This verbal shrugging-off was examined here recently as an example of the use of repetition not for emphasis but for evasion. I called it a tautophrase, a coinage bottomed on tautology, from the Greek for "redundant."
Readers are readers. Members of the Squad Squad stopped referring back to "free gifts" long enough to challenge my facts about the current plethora of pleonasm, their mock outrage often expressed with facts are facts!
Tautophrases need not be evasive, argued these readers (who shudder at refer back); on the contrary, such repetition can be imperiously dismissive. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told European diplomats that he wanted no part of fiddling with the wording of a resolution about a human rights commission: "If you want to fix the text, fix the text."
The technique of superfluity can also reflect kindness and generosity: Let bygones be bygones is an adage — not, of course, an "old" adage — that led to a liberating "Let Poland be Poland." (Prof. James Bloom of Muhlenberg College informs me that that nationalistic tautophrase is antedated by Langston Hughes's 1938 poem, "Let America Be America Again.")
Or it can show determination. The most famous tautophrase in movies is closely associated with John Wayne: "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."(Or is it gotta be? And who was the screenwriter? I am nonplused, Latin for "no more," and would appreciate getting plused by a film freak.)
A tautophrase is a phrase or sentence that repeats an idea in the same words. The name was coined by William Safire in The New York Times.
Examples include:
"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." wikiJohn_Wayne" title="John Wayne"John Wayne
"A la guerre comme à la guerre" — A French phrase literally meaning "at war as at war", and figuratively roughly equivalent to the English phrase "All's fair in love and war"
Qué será, será or che será, será — grammatically incorrect English loan from the Italian, meaning "Whatever will be, will be."
The state of being — is, am, will be and such — is as central to a tautophrase as a repeated word. Thus, "assertions of fixity," as Jacques Barzun calls them — such as "handsome is as handsome does" and "I can only feel as I feel" — do not qualify, nor does Stanislaw Lee's philosophical "Think before you think." What's what makes the cut, as do Gertrude Stein's "Rose is a rose is a rose" and her derogation of Oakland, Calif., as "There is no there there." So does Sigmund Freud's reported "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
The most famous "am" tautophrase is not, as I had it, Popeye's "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam!" Before that, Shakespeare had his Iago say " I am not what I am."
In 1611, seven years after he wrote "Othello," the King James Version of the Bible was published. It contained this English translation of Exodus 3:14, quoting God's answer to Moses' request for source attribution at the burning bush: "I am that I am." Subsequent translations of that puzzling phrase include "I am who I am," "I am what I am" and "I shall be as I shall be."
The sentence is reprised in the New Testament in an epistle (that's a letter) of the apostle Paul, First Corinthians 15:10: "But by the grace of God I am what I am."
I announced proudly the finding of an early use of it is what it is dating to 1949. Comes now an "Aha!" from Jeffrey Apparius of e-mail-land with this epistle: "It appears that it (it is, what it is) had also been used (with a comma) in the New York Times 'Topics of the Day' column of Sept. 20, 1851." Here it is: "Whether it is just what it should have been in all its detail The Courier will not say; 'but it is, what it is, and cannot, without destroying it, be made otherwise.' " Note that quote within a quote; it means that the saying originated before that. We will find it when we find it.
Fraught — With or Without?
"I have always thought the word fraught, 'weighted,' had to be used with a with, as in 'fraught with sorrow,' " writes Marianne Makman of New Rochelle, N.Y. "Lately it appears classy to use it alone, and I hate that!" She describes her state as "at the moment fraught with irritation."
Similarly, Henry Hecht of Demarest, N.J. (I like correspondents who say where they're from), notes a subhead in The Times Magazine describing an issue as "divisive and fraught" and asks "Can fraught be left on its own, or does the magazine make up its own usage?"
Fraught and the noun freight have the same heavy Dutch root, but fraught, the adjective, is now enjoying vogue use.
Shakespeare used it in "King Lear" without the with, as Goneril urges her crazed father to "make use of that good wisdom, Whereof I know you are fraught; and put away these dispositions, that of late transform you.. . ."
The use of with changes the meaning of fraught. Standing alone, fraught means "marked by emotional distress or tension." When the preposition with is added, what's distressing the subject can be made specific.
"If you want to say that a marriage was full of tension," explains Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the newsletter Copy Editor, "you can say that someone had 'a fraught marriage' or that 'the marriage was fraught,' and leave off 'with tension' because the word fraught alone implies tension or emotional distress. If, however, you want to specify what something was fraught with — beyond what you can assume from fraught alone — you can say a situation was fraught with danger or potential pitfalls or violence, uncertainty, risk. If you used fraught alone, it wouldn't necessarily carry the connotations of peril or risk — just tension."
Same type of distinction with the adjective charged: you can say "the atmosphere was charged," suggesting a sense of excitement in the air, or, if you want to get specific, "charged with anticipation, electricity, eroticism, impending doom" or whatever else thrills.
Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsman, gave a nice dig to the overuse of the adjective by stretching it to a noun: