Which is to say, you know what I mean?

In yesterday's little mini-rant ('And what not, and everything like that') I wrote of certain phrases that people often use when speaking which displease me, as I can find no reason for them to ever be spoken. Such phrases, or expressions, which always occur at the end of an expression rather than at the beginning, add nothing to the conversation; rather they detract by their meaninglessness.

Yesterday I listed four of these phrases, including the aforementioned and what not and and everything like that, plus, and what have you and, and whatever it may be.

I want to make clear that I hold nothing against people who use these phrases, other than wishing they wouldn't. Some of these people are among my dearest relatives and closest friends. These are good people, really good people, the kind of people who look you in the eye when you're talking with them and who do what they tell you they're going to do, people who keep their commitments once they've made them. The people who use these phrases will do almost anything for you, up to and including giving you the shirt off their backs. The people who use these expressions are most often well-meaning, kind, giving souls, the kind of people who fall into small bad habits innocently, whose bad habits most likely cause no one but someone like me any kind of problem or discomfort.

There are, however, two other phrases, expressions that are less innocent though no less offensive, more offensive in fact, for reasons I'll explain later, than the phrases noted above. Each follows the pattern of the other four: each always arrives at the end of an uttered expression; each is uttered so repetively by the speaker as to be regarded by the listener as habitual; each adds nothing to the utterance, so that the nothing it adds, in fact, detracts from the something that's just been said.

The two other phrases are:

1) Which is to say 

2)  You know what I mean?

(To be continued)

"What is a throne? It's a chair with some velvet", Napoleon is reported to have said. It's also said that Napoleon never opened his mail until two weeks after its arrival, believing that if a message was truly urgent it would get to him somehow.