No one wants your stupid diploma so find something else to say.

I’d like to make it official for anyone who has not already come to this conclusion (and there seems to be a lot of you):

When it comes to your education, no one wants to take it away from you.

We all know this. We’ve all known this for a very long time. There is no need to say this ever again.    

A statement like “I earned my college degree and no one can take that away from me,” makes me think that the moron making this claim could probably benefit from another year or two of higher education.

When it comes to an athletic victory, however, a statement like this is even more ridiculous because it’s not always true.

“The Red Sox won the World Series and no one can take that away from us” (a sentence I read in a book recently) is stupid because it’s cliché, trite and meaningless, but in baseball, at least it’s probably true. No professional baseball team or player has ever been stripped of a postseason award because of impropriety, and there has been a great deal of impropriety in baseball’s past.

But when it comes to sports like the Olympics, cycling, college basketball and college football, there is a long history of gold medals, yellow jerseys, league championships and Heisman Trophies being stripped from victors and handed down to the second place finishers when misconduct was discovered.

In sports, trophies and ribbons and championships can be taken away, which is even more reason to avoid this trite, nonsensical statement.