There’s a little phrase that has been creeping further into American speech over the past decade. That’s how it seems, anyway, based on the ever-growing number of complaints about its use. Online, people grumble that it’s all over podcasts, movie podcasts in particular: The film critics on “Blank Check” overuse it, Amanda Dobbins of “The Big Picture” is too fond of it, a host on “We Hate Movies” says it at least five times per episode. One Redditor hears it everywhere, even on dumb sports podcasts. Another calls it a “plague.” Others report that it has become “an unremarkable staple” at work or conclude that it “has apparently reached critical mass.”
The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all Xes.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context.
The phrasing itself is not new. Many generations of English speakers have gotten to the root of it all, savored the thrill of it all or sighed over the stupidity of it all, from 18th-century religious verse to “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” (“The shade of it all!”) The modern twist is the insertion of comically specific subjects, the rise of shorthand expressions like, say, “the not-getting-nominated-for-an-Oscar of it all.” There is a moment, toward the end of the 1997 film “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” when you can actually hear the old habit sliding into the new. One character chuckles over another’s despair — “the misery, the exquisite tragedy, the Susan Hayward of it all.” Hayward, a midcentury actress, collected Oscar nominations for tragic roles like an alcoholic singer, a different alcoholic singer, a determined disabled singer and a death-row inmate. But notice how the script uses more traditional of-it-alls — the misery, the tragedy — to ramp up to that reference.
All these film references hint at one place our snowclone might be blowing in from: Hollywood.
Consider the TV comedy “Community,” whose characters were constantly discussing the structure and tropes of television itself. In a 2011 episode, a character named Annie, curious where she fit into a friend’s romantic life, asked him about “the Annie of it all — the long looks, the stolen glances, the general atmosphere of would they, might they.” When fans started discussing her phrasing online, one of the show’s writers, Andy Bobrow, dropped by to explain. “‘The X of it all’ is an annoying phrase that had started creeping into business speak, particularly in the meetings we had with executives,” he wrote. “Typically in reference to the process of making the show. ‘We need to address the Bob Greenblatt of it all,’ or ‘What are you guys doing about the budget of it all?’ It was super annoying to us, so we made fun of it.”
The same impulse ran through “BoJack Horseman,” the animated Netflix show about a troubled former sitcom star who is also an anthropomorphic horse. When I asked the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, about its frequent use of the phrase, he pointed to a 2015 episode in which Bojack’s girlfriend, Wanda — a television executive (and burrowing owl) — is upset by his distrust of a human named Alex. “BoJack,” she says, “I am really bumping on the whole you-not-liking-Alex of it all.”
“She’s having a sincere relationship moment,” Bob-Waksberg said via email, “but she phrases it like she’s giving a network note.” There’s “bumping on,” which he described as “executive-ese for ‘not liking’” — a very innocent, fake-passive way to say that something must change. “‘The whole X of it all’ feels similarly Hollywood-executive-ish,” he said. “It’s a way to speak about things casually, broadly and vaguely in order to reduce friction. ‘Here’s the general area of concern; you fill in the blanks.’”
This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else. (It’s not just blockbusters, meet-cutes and cutting to the chase; there are also elevator pitches, “high concept,” things that don’t “track,” possibly even the use of “on the nose” to mean “too obvious” as opposed to “exactly right,” though I cannot prove that one to Times fact-checking standards.) This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.
Wanda the owl was neither the first nor the last character on “BoJack Horseman” to talk about the whole X of it all. The first was a flailing book editor, Pinky Penguin — though he soon bailed on publishing and found a job in … network television. The show continued to sprinkle the phrase across its six seasons, from Pinky’s “the book of it all” to “the whole ex-wife of it all” to the point where a man is drugged, transported to Chicago and then asked if he’s “still processing the whole being-kidnapped-across-state-lines of it all.”
“Why did we use the phrase elsewhere in the show, in places where we weren’t mocking executives?” Bob-Waksberg asked. “Well, I guess in time, we writers internalized the phrase ourselves to the point where we forgot it was a joke; it just became part of our collective vernacular. I guess we all eventually become the things we mock.”
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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