What phrases in the media are you sick and tired of?

[ailsagirl]

84. That's a real oldie

It's actually odd that anybody's still using the phrase. By rights it should have gone the way of dated '60s slang like "right on" and "can you dig it?" Like those expressions, "tell it like it is" had its roots in black speech in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then it just meant to come clean about something. In 1954, the R&B singer Roy Milton had a modest hit that went "Tell it like it is, Don't say you love me when I know you don't."

The phrase caught on in the early '60s, when black activists made "tell it like it is" a byword for confronting the realities of race in America. It was picked up by the hippies and the student left, and it soon became a hallmark of youth culture. Howard Cosell promptly co-opted it as a slogan, and the frenetic disc jockey Murray Kaufman wrote a guide to the younger generation called Murray The K Tells It Like it Is, Baby.

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/15/423194262/tracing-the-origin-of-the-campaign-promise-to-tell-it-like-it-is