"It" is a deeply mysterious word
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published November 19, 1978
1/20/2016
If you were to ask me – and let me admit right away – it isn’t the kind of question anybody is likely to come up with - but if you were to ask me what is the most powerful and most deeply mysterious word in the English language, I would have to reply “It.”
There is hardly a doubt in my mind that without “It” English would be at best a crippled language, limping along down the highway of meaning, often falling, often stopping and often going astray.
Just consider “It” for a moment. A pronoun, says the grammar. Third person singular. Neuter. But a pronoun is a sort of nickname for a noun or, as the grammarians more formally put the matter, a pronoun stands in for the noun.
The frightening thing about “It” is that it doesn’t. “It” very often stands all by itself (see how often it turns up by the way) as if the shadow had become the substance.
A creature in it’s own right, “It” moves independent of the rules of grammar, takes on a life of its own and towers above the whole glittering landscape of English syntax.
There was a movie once, or maybe it was a horror story, which was simply called “It” and in that tiny word, standing alone on a dark background, there was enough terror to make the flesh crawl and strong men feel threatened by what might lie under their beds on a dark night.
What does “It” stand for in that title? Not for one particular noun but for all terrors and graveyard imaginings; for all the foul fluids which flow through the mind in a creaking house at 3 in the morning, when one is conscious of being all alone except for the relentless approach of “It.”
But “It” has other Usages, other realms in which it rules not as a menace but as a changeling – the sublime, and – well, the sublime.
I happened to have with me, one afternoon, driving around Los Angeles, a young lady from Belgium who was pursuing the English language word by word as a stamp collector pursues his hobby stamp by stamp.
“He’s found it,” she cried, looking at the bumper on a Volkie ahead and to the right. “What has he found?”
“God,” I replied. “If you lean out of the window, you will have your head taken off.”
“God is It?” she asked, incredulous.
“Another word for God is It?”
“No. Not really” I told you wrong. It doesn’t mean God. It means spiritual happiness. God is a sense; but also everything associated with man’s relationship to God.”
“Religion?”
“Okay. Religion. That thing that went past your right ear by the way is called a ‘semi’ so why don’t you get your head back inside so I can return you to Brussels in a condition for your parents to embrace?”
She brought her head inside but it popped out again in a moment. She seemed incapable of looking through a windscreen.
“That’s good,” she said.
“What’s good?”
“That bumper plaster. ‘Do It in the Dirt’. He’s a nice man.”
I considered that for a moment. She looked a bit young and country-fresh for such a view – but these days you just don’t know.
“You pray in bed?”
“Pray? What has praying got to do with this?”
She explained the whole thing to me patiently.
“One man said he’d found It. You said that It was God or religion and that’s prayers. The other man says on his bumper plaster to ‘Do It in the Dirt.’ So doesn’t that mean to say your prayers in the dirt?”
“That’s a different, kind of It,” I replied.
“What kind of It is it?”
I don’t know why I had to wait until I was 60 before young girls put those kinds of questions to me.
“The second kind of It is uh – well, the second kind of It is not praying. It’s the kind of It between a boy and a girl.”
A long, strained silence. “In the dirt?” she asked, at length.
“Just an expression,” I said. “There was a Beatles song ‘Do it on the Road’ or something like that. Same sort of thing. Really means, uh – what ever you want it to mean.”
As we were turning off the freeway, we had the bad luck to run into another bumper plaster as she called them.
It read, “I never lost it.”
She looked at me and smiled. “That’s good,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s good. Lucky guy.”
There must be some queer conversations going on in Brussels these evenings between that very nice young girl and her parents. All about “It” – in its 57 varieties.
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