“You Know” is used within the same way as “like” or “humm” is used in an English speaking culture. It’s a tick, a hiccup. It is used by a person for a very quick pause to gather their thoughts. For others, it’s just a display of undisciplined speech.
Linguists call interjections like “You Know” and “like” and “humm” and “I mean” and a large number of others ‘filler’ or ‘discourse practices’. It is like an unconscious way of a pause in the middle of a sentence as the person speaking gathers his or her thoughts but wants to maintain the listener’s attention.
However, It might appear that such fillers; which have minimal grammatical value, have widely spoken in daily conversions to such an extent that they threaten to further damage the sweetness, power, and effectiveness of verbal communication.
Most of the time this is meaningless filler, and as such is quite overused, but there are also other uses. These are often used to refer to an idea that may be difficult or tedious to express in words but that the speaker thinks it is related.
Examples –
- So I’m walking home from work, when all of a sudden I got this feeling, You Know? Like someone is watching me.
- If you keep doing that, you will suffer from cold and fever, You Know?
- You Know, that’s really not a bad idea.
Many speakers and sentences with “You Know?”, hope that their listener won’t detect their lack of authoritative information and can mentally fill within the missing or suspect information for them because they can’t.
