[continuing tangent] He was quite possibly innocent, y’know. [/continuing tangent]
And I usually assume people never heard of things, but I leave it to them to Google it their own damn selves.
I use “you’ve probably never heard of it,” all the time. Mainly around deaf people because I’m an asshole.
Ftttt. I was a big fan of Scopalamine back when it was still working with Atropine, as part of the original “Belladonna.”
Scopalamine’s solo work is commercial crap; Atropine really had all the soul of the pair.
:{
This one’s going in the joke bank.
Huh. I’ve never heard of the phrase “you’ve probably never heard of it.”
You must be watching the wrong documentaries. The ones I watch would never say that, but you’ve probably never heard of them.
To the OP: I think you might be a bit over-sensitive. I mean, the rest of us just can’t win! I once taught a class (first- and second-year college students). Half my teacher evaluation comments were “The teacher shouldn’t assume we know so much…”, and the other half were “The teacher shouldn’t say ‘You might not know this…’, because it’s insulting…of course we know it.”. !!!
In other words, when someone says somthing like that, nine times out of ten it’s because they’re trying to be nice, and not make you think that they assume everyone knows or cares about exactly the same things. The one time out of ten they’re really being a jerk, you can hear that in the tone of their voice – “duh, I’m SURE you don’t know this, AND that makes you a bad person compared to me”.
If you’re getting that vibe more than 10% of the time someone says something like this to you, then either: 1. You hang out with assholes, or 2. You have some insecurities.
How about saying “well, you probably know this already but… (launch into spiel)”.
Politeness and education in one!
The ones I watch use the phrase, “You know, you’re soaking in it.”
I hated everybody and everything that all of you ever hated, but I hated them before you hated them and for obscure reasons you wouldn’t appreciate. I was like the James Brown of hating. Now that you all hate, I have passed into a post-hatred ennui where I observe you hating with a certain bored weariness. The irony of this is that I hate myself for being the trailblazer who first made hating cool. I was going to go with codpieces, but at the last moment chose hatred.
I once met a proto-hipster: he was into being into things before everyone else, before everyone else was. *
Seriously though, I really did meet a guy who was very wrapped up in himself who studied neuro-linguistics and, I think, linguistic relativity. Anyway, he was awfully pleased with himself about this, and he basically said “you’ve never heard of it”. I said “you mean like Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?” (which I’d read up on in a seminar in college). It was priceless to see him deflate.
- It’s a pity he wasn’t from Buffalo.
Okay, I laughed. How about this one?
Boy, if life were only like this.
I used to be totally into the Kennebec River, but now it’s all Maine stream.
I always thought it came from news reports. “You’ve probably never heard of X, but you eat it every day, and it can kill you! Tune in at 11 for a special report.”
When someone says to me “you’ve probably never heard of it” I immediately feel very neutral and think to myself “I’ve probably never heard of it, which means it must not be well known to the majority of the population”
<Golf clap>
That was absolutely brilliant!
Never heard of it myself.
Anyhow, like RaftPeople, I don’t think of anything negative when that phrase comes up. It probably is something I don’t know and, if it’s not, then the speaker and I suddenly have conversational fodder, as we both happen to be into the same esoterica.
The only time a phrase similar to that has tripped me up was in an undergraduate introductory cognitive science course. Most of the students were freshmen and sophomores, and the class historically was a fairly manageable one in terms of difficulty. It had no prerequisites. It was a typical distro (distribution requirements class.) Our class was taught by a new teacher who apparently had no concept of the level of students he was teaching to when one of his lectures began with “I don’t know how many of you have studied neurolinguistics…” and then went on to give a lecture filled with jargon and scientific terms I had never heard of. I would have preferred he thought we were idiots. Needless to say, I dropped that class.
I was seriously LOL’ing in the quarry on that one.
That’s not politeness, that’s obnoxious. If I already know it, I don’t need to hear you babbling on about it, do I? If I don’t, you’ve just made me feel like an idiot because I don’t know something that’s apparently so common you’d assume I did know.
We actually use that image at work to describe one of our coworkers. She’ll walk in in the morning with her big fake hipster glasses and scarf and we all just look at each other and start laughing. She knows about it though and it embraces it. 
I also enjoy pulling Hipster Ariel on her since she does some design.