Learn English – Is “how you do you” grammatical

colloquial-languageinterrogativessubordinate-clauses

I read this on the Stack Overflow blog:

Computer security is always evolving. Passwords are “what you know.”
Smart cards are “what you have.” We decided to ask “how you do you.

Is the phrase in bold a grammatically correct one?

Best Answer

Yes and no: it is meaningful, but you have to interpret it in a very specific way.

The context is about the difference between
-something you know (for example, a password)
-something you have (for example, a key)
-something you are (that is, you yourself!)

The article starts by mentioning how we deal with how you prove something you know or something you have. "How you do you" is being used as a kind of shorthand for "how you prove something that you are."

It would be much clearer if it were punctuated differently, like

We decided to ask how you do "you".

because when they say "you" they really mean "perform the action of proving that you are who you say you are."