h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Pretty much.

Here's an instance of the double is I heard on the radio yesterday http://www.npr.org/2015/09/21/442148877/the-long-strange-history-of-the-u-s-the-atom-and-iran

If you can bear to hear Dubya's voice (and listen to him say 'nucular' , by all means listen to it. If not, here's part of the transcript: "The message to the Iranian people is, is that your government is going to cause you deprivation."

The second 'is' isn't necessary, and that's a perfect example of it. It's like, for example, saying something like 'The problem is, is that...'. You only need one 'is'.

Yep... that's a bad one.

The double is comes from the formulation...
Ok, imagine someone describing a car:

"What it is, is a device to get you from A to B."

Now in that sentence it does make sense, in the same way you'd say "what it eats is______", or "what it does is_____" -it just so happens that you are using the same verb twice.

"What it is a device to get you from A to B" just wouldn't make sense. You need the second "is".

And from that, people have just got used to hearing "is is", and use it where it makes no sense at all.

Oh, I understand there are sentence constructions where you can quite properly have two instances of 'is' together, but where I keep hearing it (and it's only been in recent years I've been noticing it) isn't one of them, and it's people who you would think know better (except for Dubya of course) who I hear using it.

There's handful of little teasers where you can have the same word several times in a row. One of my junior school teachers explained to us the 'five ands' one, where a signwriter hasn't left enough room between "Waring and And, and And and Gillow", and there's another well known one that I can't recall, and never quite understood that, I think, has six or seven instances of the same word in a row.

Five ands. That's very nearly fork andles

You can use four hads in a row and it reads clearly. "The faith that he had had had had an effect on his life."

But the really long and confusing one you may be thinking of is the "Buffalo sentence".

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

It's tortuously explained on wikipedia.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

That's the one

This reminds me of the apocryphal story of the railwayman who was asked when the trains started and stopped each day - "they run from two to two, to two to two, too."

Are you sure he wasn't telling the bloke what they sound like when they toot their whistle?