[ابو بيشو]

Consider the following three sentences:
"What has to happen is is that the money has to come from somewhere."
"What I'm telling you is is that the economy's strong, it's getting stronger."
"The thing is is that the pickle selection on this menu is staggering."
The first is from Obama during a presidential debate, the second from a speech Bush II gave to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the third from me during a late-night dinner at Jacob’s Pickles on 85th and Amsterdam in New York, but all adhere to the same basic structure. A set-up: The thing is. Followed by a pay-off: the pickle selection on this menu is staggering. The head-scratcher, of course, is the extra is, usually bound to a that, that insinuates itself between the setup and the payoff.
So just what is this construction? Most linguists call this doubled is ISIS, although it also appears in the literature as "Double-is," "Extra-is," "Double-be," and—should you prefer—the "Nonstandard Reduplicative Copula." And while linguists aren't yet in agreement about what need ISIS fills, or exactly how to classify it among the already Borgesian taxonomy of linguistic categories and subcategories, they have been tracking it for nearly 30 years and developing a number of theories, some of which make intuitive sense to me.
First off, let’s establish what ISIS is not. Surely, every once in a while you hear a sentence like this: What it is is a sour pickle. This is not a case of ISIS. Why? Because the double is in this sentence follows standard rules of syntax. What it is is (as it were) the subject of the sentence. Subjects need verbs; in this case, that verb happens to be is. But utter What I mean is is that we like pickled beets, and suddenly the normal rules of syntax are out the window. In the ISIS sentence, What I mean is the subject. It, too, needs a verb, which may very well be is. But it doesn't need two ises any more than it needs two of any other verb. According to standard rules of syntax, that is.