I recently tuned into the New York Yankees / Philadelphia Phillies World Series pregame baseball playoff program and was not surprised to hear the overuse of “YOU KNOW!” Only in the last few years have I noticed how many times it has been overused in interviews with famous athletes.

Why is it that when a famous athlete is asked a question while being interviewed, does he always reply somewhere in his answer with “You know”? It doesn’t matter what sport the athlete is from, be it baseball, hockey, basketball, and there are probably others … they all say so. Is this something from North America? I’ll let you know when I start paying more attention to interviews with UK football players.

Also, if viewers knew what an athlete was going to say, there would be no need for the interview. Right? Athletes may be tired of always having to answer the same old questions from reporters. Perhaps we, the audience, know the responses of the athletes.

Actually, I find the use of this phrase in the responses extremely annoying. I would like the interviews of all athletes not to use this phrase in their responses or at least limit its use to just one time. Like I said, “You know, if I did, then the sports reporters wouldn’t be interviewing you in the first place!”

This term is like a disease among athletes and it seems very contagious! More and more athletes are saying it. Its spread cannot be contained among athletes and will spread rapidly from sport to sport. How can we contain this verbal illness? It seems that this disease is totally unstoppable.

I also recently brought up the overuse of YOU KNOW on Twitter, but let’s face it, with 140 characters you can’t say much consistently on the Twitter website. Who would have thought that 140 characters would have made this site so famous and so talked about in the media and used by the news channels. Imagine if every comedian was forced to tell their joke in 140 characters !!!

Let’s go back to those interviews between reporters and a couple of star pitchers in this World Series. I was listening to CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee being interviewed. Both pitchers are extremely amazing. Each of them also uses “You know” many times in their answers. CC Sabathia went absolutely overboard in her responses using this phrase so many, many times, that I lost count keeping count!

I think it would be really interesting to keep a tally of how many “You know” each athlete uses and to get a ratio of use to word count. Who would you link win? I think he should have kept a list of all the abusers of the phrase “You know” in his conversations with reporters. Perhaps write a follow-up article in the near future with a list of famous athletes who use this phrase the most.

In my opinion, this article is a more humorous look at the sport. Maybe I’m doing a lot about nothing, but then Seinfeld was supposedly a comedy show about nothing and look … it turned out to be one of the best and most successful comedy TV shows of all time. We haven’t seen such a great show since it went off the air.

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