You know. I mean. You know.
I can't be alone in noticing this right? When did 'you know' and 'I mean' creep in to usurp 'uhh' and 'umm' in our spoken conversations?
If Hamlet were alive today:
You know, To be, or not to be: like that is the question:
I mean, Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or you know to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? I mean To die: to sleep;
No more;...
I mean, you know?
How do you speak? I find that I have to actually speak more slowly to censor myself from using 'You know' in places where it clearly isn't necessary.
I tend to listen to a lot of talk radio, mostly WGNRadio 720 or ESPN 1000 (the Chicago version anyway) and many many callers are infected with the 'You know' virus. Even the hosts, the professional talkers, let these linguistic crutches into their vocabulary. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that I hear it across gender, age and ethnic divides. Older callers, younger callers, men, women, etc and on. There doesn't seem to be anyone spared from this linguistic malware.
If 'You know' and 'I mean' were computer viruses we could run a scan and get them removed from our cortex pretty easily but unfortunately they aren't and we can't. Mr. Scientist, have you looked into linguistics at all? What purpose or function do these constructions play in our language?
Even though I make an active effort to censor my own speech, I am not without my own personal linguistic crutches. I don't catch all of the 'you knows' and 'I means' when speaking, but my real crutch of choice seems to be 'that sort of thing.' I usually tack it on to the end of a sentence when talking with someone and explaining what the Church teaches about some topic or other or fixing a computer issue or any other item that I have to explain to someone.
Being a reflectional sort of person I tend to examine my thoughts and decisions pretty regularly which makes talking to someone interesting on my end. I'll be having a conversation and in the midst of talking one of these linguistic crutches will slip itself into my vocal stream and the reflective part of my brain will see it sitting there waiting to jump in and sometimes it sweeps it away quickly but other times there is a physical pause in my speech while I figure out how to talk around the crutch. In some ways this gets annoying but in others it stimulates my inquisitive self to wonder and spit out these pensées that you read.
Are there any linguists out there who can shed light on this phenomenon? What can we do collectively to scrub such barnacles from our speech?