Some of these Yogi-isms occur simply through incorrect use of words.

Such as: “He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”  Or: “It ain’t the heat. It’s the humility.”

Others involve absent-minded errors.

Such as: “Even Napoleon had his Watergate.” Or, giving instructions for a spring training drill to the players he coached at the New York Mets: "Pair off in threes."

Still others have a quality to them which borders on mystical - but drops to earth just short of the line.

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” It’s almost like something George Harrison brought back from that other Yogi - Maharishi Mahesh.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Or: “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”

The temptation is to keep on reeling them out, they are so wonderful.

“If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”

See what I mean?

Berra was unique - but there are echoes of his tone in things said by other sporting figures down the years.

Try this one from former NFL coach Tom Landry: “Football is an incredible game. Sometimes it’s so incredible it’s unbelievable.”

Or this one about the press from former Major League Baseball utility player Pedro Guerrero: “Sometimes they write what I say, not what I mean.”

Boxing trainer Lou Duva, who died in 1996, also came close with a couple of his utterances.  “You can sum this sport up in two words - ‘You never know.’” 

That has a Berra feel to it. As does his comment on the training regime of heavyweight Andrew Golota:

“He’s a guy who gets up at six o’clock in the morning regardless of what time it is. “

Sport seems the perfect soil in which to nurture such seedlings of senselessness.

But these opaque utterances, trembling on the brink of comprehensibility, are a world away from the hard-boiled, calculated one-liners you find on the after-dinner circuit, on the talk show or in the official autobiography.

Heavyweight boxer Rocky Graziano offered a prime example of this lumbering wit: “I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it, but because I couldn’t spell it.”

There was an overcooked feel too to this reflection by another of baseball’s big hitters, Hank Aaron: “It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.”

And this, from Tiger Woods, has a studied feel to it despite its arresting imagery: “Hockey is a sport for white men. Baseball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like pimps.”

George Best, a shy and naturally funny man in private according to those who really knew him, such as his mate and Manchester City rival Mike Summerbee, brandished his one-liners like a shield: “I spent 90 per cent of my money on women and drink - the rest I wasted.” Cue laughter.

This is not to say that conscious humour is unfunny in the sporting context. There are quotes that prove otherwise.

This one, for instance, from former NHL goaltender Jacques Plante, is a singularly humorous observation: “Goaltending is a normal job, sure. How would you like it if every time you made a small mistake a red light went on over your desk and 15,000 people stood up and yelled at you?”

Or how about these two inspired jabs from Muhammad Ali:

“It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand, I beat people up.”

“I’ve seen George Foreman shadow boxing and the shadow won.”

The latter resides securely in the section marked Wit.

That said, the appeal of Berra’s misnomers and malapropisms lies in its artlessness. If one thought any of it was said for effect, so much of the humour would be dispelled, leaving merely the kind of snappy verbal collocations you find on tee-shirts.

But that was not how it was with Berra

“There are people who, if they don’t already know, you can’t tell ‘em.”

“We made too many wrong mistakes.”

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

“It ain’t over till it’s over”.

These are all genuine, spur-of-the-moment utterances, and the more sublime for that.

As Berra himself explained:  “A lot of guys say ‘Hey, Yog, say a Yogi-ism.’ I tell ‘em, ‘I don’t know any.’ They want me to make one up. I don’t make ‘em up. I don’t even know when I say it. They’re the truth. And it is the truth. I don’t know.”