Australien wrote:
FireBird wrote:
The phrase that bothers me the most that people say is, "it is what it is." Basically to me it means who cares about what is happening. It annoys me.
It's also a pointless phrase. How could "it" be anything other than what "it is"?
I'd say that it's not so much "Who cares?", as saying that people are doing too much abstracting and arguing about what the thing or situation is -- just point to it, and that's the extensional definition.
If you want to define "elephant", you go to the zoo and point to elephant1, elephant2, elephant3, and so forth. If you're arguing about what the protestors are doing on Wall Street right now, you might say that they're a bunch of socialists, or a bunch of people who want jobs, or a bunch of people who aren't happy with the way the government has been performing, but still want to support President Obama, or a bunch of druggies and partiers looking for sex, or who knows? There might be some truth to all those statements, and none of them totally true: each is abstracting different aspects of what's happening.