Here are two consecutive sentences written by Neill Woelk, a writer for the Boulder Daily Camera. They appeared in today's paper. "Simply, if Bohn decides to leave for another job, CU should be fairly compensated. Thing is, Bohn doesn't have a contract yet." My questions: is "thing is" an acceptable substitute for "moreover," or "the point is that"? and b) if it is, when did it come to be so? To my ear, it's lazy, substandard writing far too colloquial and slangy even for a provincial newspaper. Our of electronic curiosity, I googled "thing is," but 43,200,000 hits was too big a basket to sift.
I take "thing is" to be a sloppy distillation of "the thing of it is." It turns out that "the thing of it is" is well-established in American speech. Rush Limbaugh's a big "thing of it is" guy. On the missing weapons in Iraq, "the thing of it is, this is a serious matter"; "thing of it is, no substantive evidence has been offered to justify any of this." So is Pat Robertson. In answer to the question, "is it possible to receive a specific answer to a prayer directly from the Scriptures, Pat hedges: "Well, the thing of it is that you can't force the Bible to say,`Judas hanged himself; go thou and do likewise.' " So too, surprisingly, is the supposedly erudite William F. Buckley: "Now the thing of it is, we don't know — and we won't accumulate this knowledge, without experience...." But it's not only a right-wing locution. Here's Robert Frost, in 1915 (in "A Servant to Servants"): "Bless you, of course, you're keeping me from work,/ But the thing of it is, I need to be kept." And it's older: Bret Harte also used the expression.
I can't track "thing is." It's well established in speech, but it ought to be beneath the dignity of a morning paper. Can anyone comment on the history of "thing is?" I suspect (without evidence) that it's rural in origin.
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