The double is

I don't know if this was a regional phenomenon years ago, but for the first eighteen years of my life I never heard the double is. When I went up to UMIST I became friends with a guy from Windsor who used it all the time. I used to take the piss out of him mercilessly and he could never understand it. As far as he was concerned it was perfectly normal to say "The difference is is that I come from the South," or "What I think is is he should not of (sic) done it," or "reaching out for human faith is is like a journey I just don't have a map for."

Brief Net research suggests this abomination began in the United States (source of most English grammar mangling, unfortunately) around 1971 - which explains why I didn't hear it until 1975 - and jumped the Atlantic relatively quickly, worse luck.

In the last 10-15 years, like most appalling grammatical errors, the incorrect double is usage has gained wider currency. Whether this is due to the diaspora of "estuary English" or the dire state of grammar teaching in schools (by which I mean the almost total lack of...) or a combination of those I don't know, but it can now be heard regularly all over the country, even on what used to be considered the last bastion of grammatical correctness: Radio 4 (although the presenters on there now can't even manage their verb-subject agreement properly most of the time).

It's almost as if the speaker believes the first 'is' has become part of the preceding word. That's often how it's spoken: all run together. In the examples above it's "difference-is" or "think-is" etc.

There is, of course, a correct usage of the double is, but it is far rarer than current usage would have you believe. Used mainly for emphasis, your response to the question "what is that?" for instance, might be: "What that is, is a way of explaining how to use the double is."

The difference is that (not "is is that") in the correct usage the first "is" is always followed by a comma and is not run into the preceding word as if they were one. Try it - strike a blow for good English and a return to how things should be. And if you hear it used on Radio 4? Get on to the complaints show.

If is is is bad enough, then more recent developments are even worse. Some kind of bastardised past tense has been introduced, so we get constructs like "The only thing was is..." and only last week on The X Factor I heard Simon Cowell say "The difference being is that..." Aargh!