I saw it from a friend, who saw it from teen students who forgot their permission slips. Other people saw it during the 2019 N.B.A. playoffs, or while reading about wives in The New Yorker. If you’re active on social media, there’s a good chance you’ve already seen it; even if you aren’t, it’s coming for you. When you see it, you will love it.
“You hate to see it” is a barb, a hex protection and an imperious shake of the head. It is the exhilarating sensation of observing a rival attempt to enter a just-locked post office, manifested in text. It is inescapable on Twitter, where it is flaunted like universally flattering pair of sunglasses capable of adorning almost any sentence.
Based on its longstanding use in athletics, one can infer that it is from this realm the phrase originally emerged; its use of “you” (increasingly optional as the trend evolves) as a generic universal pronoun (rather than a reference to a clearly defined second person) suggests it derives specifically from a mass medium like sports broadcasting. Because people presumably already know what they hate, the purpose of the declaration is not to inform, but to affirm.
In its flowering, the phrase has been reimagined as a prism capable of refracting entirely new hues of meaning: schadenfreude, criticism, vague amusement and surprise, disappointment in society, self-deprecation, faux dismay, even bragging. And it is on Twitter, amid a roiling sea of you hating to see it, that every once in a while, a disoriented voice can be heard to shout above the crashing waves: Why is everyone saying this?
Apart from the most obvious explanations — that an ironic application of this expression strikes millions of people as funny and that apes, as the verb implies, are prone to imitate one another’s behavior — the truth of the matter is elusive. It is irrefutable that the percentage of “You hate to see it” in Earth’s atmosphere has increased. Google Trends data from 2004 onward shows that, after 14 years of neck-in-neck in popularity with its brother phrase, “You hate to see that,” global searches for “You hate to see it” surged skyward this April, on a trajectory with no signs of dropping. But from where? And why? How close can a person get to answering an unanswerable question?
Attempting to chart the trajectory of a trend using only Twitter is like trying to determine why Cubism became popular by studying the paintings of Georges Seurat and nothing else. However, because, of all the forms of social media clogged with years of discarded single-use observations it is the best worst option for conducting archival searches, we will focus our search efforts there.
The first ever platform usage of the phrase in its current popular form appears to be a temperature-related tweet from April 2009, three years after Twitter was founded. Over the next few years, the incidence of “You hate to see it” tweets increased, not because the phrase was becoming more popular, but because Twitter was.
For many years, the vast majority of “you hate to see it” content, like the vast majority of everything posted on Twitter, generated little to no engagement; a freak 2015 post from the account of the sports website Bleacher Report appears to have been the first tweet of the phrase (commentary on a botched hand greeting between two football players) to receive over 1,000 Twitter faves, but it failed to start a trend. It wasn’t until 2017 that the expression locked on its current all-hating, all-seeing course, and began producing tweets that regularly garnered thousands of faves.
The earliest borrowers of the original sports usage (i.e. the population that transformed the phrase from a Pollyannaish observation to a jeer) appear to have been fans and participants of esports — competitive gaming. By the summer of 2017, gamers were so steeped in the expression that commentary consisting of nothing but the statement “You hate to see it” was capable of generating hundreds of faves. By winter, it had seeped into gaming lexicon so completely that one December day, in the span of 10 minutes, two separate professional gamers lamented their inability to procure limited edition “Blue Tint” YEEZY Boost sneakers using identical phrasing. It was around that autumn that the term appeared to be gradually regaining popularity in legacy sports: in October, Houston Texans player J.J. Watt (himself a known gamer) offered a sincere “Hate to see it” assessment of a fellow N.F.L. star’s injury, to a chorus of retweets (4,860) and faves (38,608); two days later, the founder of the contentious website Barstool Sports tweeted it the first of many times (initially in ironic reference to a cheerleader’s wardrobe mishap).
Throughout 2018, “You hate to see it” roared through gaming, occasionally bleeding over into other fandoms — soccer fans appear to have embraced it particularly early. That October, the expression’s reach expanded again, as people who love Boston spent days taunting everyone else about the Red Sox’s World Series performance. The autumn openings of the regular N.B.A. and N.F.L. seasons further increased the populations of people using it on Twitter; by January of 2019, sports fans were regularly incorporating it into tweets about other topics, such as weather.
But it seems the defining evolutionary leap occurred this spring. Here, then, is one possible charting of the “You hate to see it” course: Its headwaters were a sports commentary aphorism. Eventually, it flowed into esports culture. Gamers, a population that both seeks and spurns traditional athletic legitimacy, were primed to both adopt and mock the term, thereby reinventing it.
For legacy sports followers, this ironic application refreshed what had become a cliché, and new fan populations were exposed to the reimagined “You hate to see it” with the unfolding of each successive sports season. Bends occurred where populations overlapped: where FIFA gamers met soccer fans. Where soccer fans met baseball fans. Where sportswriters met culture writers. Where culture writers met culture. It appears to have been between these last two stages that, roughly two years after the phrase was initially reinvigorated, it achieved its current popularity. A likely catalyst: Black Twitter watching “Game of Thrones.”
The show’s eighth and final season was big business for Twitter. It set and then smashed multiple new platform records (the most tweeted-about TV episode of all time; the new most tweeted-about TV episode of all time) over its run. Under normal conditions, Black Twitter is a prominent subculture from which many widespread cultural trends emerge; when combined with the inexorable force of online response to a fanciful quasi-medieval political drama, the resulting discussion became a phenomenon. Universal thirst for instant “Game of Thrones” feedback ensured that these were quickly disseminated by and to a more diverse audience.
“Rhaegar died so his son can go live with Wildlings,” tweeted Darron Lee, a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs. “No dragon, nothing…ya hate to see it…” He received 206 retweets.
“Mannnnn,” wrote Vann R. Newkirk II, a staff writer for The Atlantic. “Jon gave Ghost the loose acquaintance nod. Hate to see it.” He received 207.
From that point, it spread faster than conjunctivitis.
What exactly, is the distinct pleasure of hating to see it?
Even in its sincerest form, it expresses concern at a remove — a quality that enabled a statement of empathy to be reinterpreted as cheek shining out from behind a courteous scrim. In this way, it’s not unlike the versatile Southern phrase “bless your heart” — a key difference is that even the most well-meaning “you hate to see it” is not something a speaker could ever say to the affected person’s face. (It would be out of place in a funeral receiving line, even though the death of a loved one is the kind of thing you hate to see.)
The genius of its rudeness is its politeness; it conveys simultaneously that something is both unfortunate and not the speaker’s problem; Gene Demby, the host of the NPR podcast “Code Switch,” observed that it exists “at the nexus of concern and disdain.” Its tone is trivializing. It is the voice of someone with authority declining to express more than mild sympathy, regardless of how personally devastating a situation might be for those involved. The implication is not disbelief or anger (“I can’t believe that happened!”) but a knowing sang-froid (“It happens.”). The choice to end abruptly on “it,” rather than allowing the sentence to gently peter out (“ … happen to a great team”) is itself demeaning, as whatever transpired is so commonplace, “it” does not warrant the effort of specificity. Since it’s only ever employed after the fact of an event, there is no effort made toward attempt or intervention. It is satisfied with its own comfort.
Using the phrase correctly is simple — virtually anything can be something that you hate to see, particularly since its growing ubiquity means that novel applications increasingly tend toward the absurd (and self-specific). The current fashion of its humor comes from applying it on either the most epic scale or the most minute. The invocation to the muse at the start of the Iliad could easily be replaced with the more concise “Achilles’ wrath — you hate to see it!” You might also hate to see yourself watching the British reality TV program “Love Island.”
Now we enter the period where the spectacle of “hate to see it” becomes the focus of explainers and think pieces. This means the phrase enters the twilight of its heyday — to which there is but one response. What a shame.
