Over the weekend, my roommates and I held a small get-together at our home in honor of one our birthdays. Throughout the evening, our guests started to arrive and when my friend Marty showed up I greeted him by saying, "What it is?" This sparked a small, but interesting, grammatical debate.
When I asked Marty, "What it is?" he was without answer. In fact, he claimed to not know how to answer my 'question' because it wasn't a complete thought. Marty, along with several others in attendance, claimed that 'what it is', in either its question or statement form (yes, it can be both) is not a complete sentence. His argument was that there is no subject. To me, it always seemed clear; 'What' is the subject and 'is' is the verb, thus, complete sentence. I'm not sure if that is right or wrong, but I stand by my argument.
I'll admit, I'm not sure where I learned the phrase and since there is no official etymological source for slang, I can only ascertain some of the phrase's history from a simple Google search. (See results here.)
(No) Thanks to Google, it seems 'what it is' is most predominately a novel by Lynda Barry, and secondly, a funk/soul compilation album. Considering how I've neither read Barry's novel nor heard the funk compilation, the source of my learning 'what it is' remains and will remain unknown.
With no real information gained about the phrase from Google, I was left with no option but to use the most helpful source in the slang universe, UrbanDictionary.com
A search for 'what it is' in the Urban Dictionary, or the U.D. for you slang-speakers, brings up two pages worth of definitions. While I wholly disagree with the first definition, a code word for alcohol, a majority of the definitions share a salutatory commonality. According to the U.D., 'what it is' is most frequently used to mean something to the effect of 'what is going on?' or 'how is it going?' It even has a synonym, 'what it do.'
By no means is the U.D. an official source for the English language, and it by no means does it offer any grammatical insight, but it is a source that affirms my proper use of the phrase, and for me, that's enough.
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I was just curious as to how you picked up on this phrase, "What it is." Maybe I've been living in a box for some time now, but I've never heard that expression. When I see my friends at parties, we usually say "What's up?" As I was reading your blog, I was trying to say "What it is" in question form out loud and hard a time doing so. It doesn't flow to me. I'm not saying you're wrong here. I believe that it is slang. I was just wondering where it started or exactly how common it is.
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