In the past two weeks, I have been involved in at least three discussions on the current use of "so." In the last couple of days, still another discussion took place, this time on Facebook, after I wrote:
I first noticed people starting their sentences with "so" when I was at a neuroscience conference a couple of years ago put on by U of Mass. It sounded a little weird but I guessed it was a part of their culture. Therefore I was very amused when Glenn Close, speaking at Neuroscience 2010, said that beginning a sentence with "so" seemed to be "neuroscience speak." (Link to her talk below.) Now the practice of starting a sentence with "so" seems to have moved into bigger circles; e.g., I have heard lawyers doing it a lot recently. What's up with this talking tic?
Close mentions it at about 7:30 [on this video].
I also posted on Facebook a link to "Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead" (New York Times). Excerpt:
SO this is about the word “so.”
There, I did it. And if you speak English for work or pleasure, there is a fair chance that you’ve done it, too.
“So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things ... .
I decided to ask Dr. George Gopen, one of favorite language gurus and professor of both legal writing and English at Duke University, what he thought. (Click to read my interview of Dr. Gopen from a few years ago.) Here is the e-mail he sent (posted with his permission):
So you want my opinion, do you?
I suspect that because of the new fascination with writing -- because of e-mails and blogs and tweets -- we are going to see more and more speech habits creep into the written world. "So" can be used by a speaker as a time staller, while one speedily collects one's thoughts just a mite better. In that usage, it is equivalent to "umm" or "well" or "ahhh" or the clever tactic of repeating your interlocutor's last few words while you ponder what your next original ones will be. As in,
"I tell you, if this is going to work, we've got to be there before three o'clock."
"Before three o'clock? Well, umm, ahh, so do you think we can be finished at the Olsons' by 2:45?"
Another use of the oral "so" is to indicate you've been listening to the other person and are furthering their thought or suggesting a logical next step or outcome of their thought. It's a kind of compliment -- or sometimes a rejoinder.
"But it only takes five minutes, maybe less, to get there from the Olsons'.
"So you think we could leave as late as 2:55. Hmmm."
That's a decent use of "so" as a connector. But it will suffer from the same abuse that words like "thus" and "therefore" and "however" have been subjected to over the years. Miss Grundy taught us "transitions" were good. So we used them, whether or not they meant what they were supposed to mean. They functioned as a mature-sounding clearing of the throat, giving more dignity and weight to the sentence that followed hard upon.
Words are born, are changed in mid-life, and die. That's natural. We should accept it. But change is hard for most of us. So when we have a word do something new, or pop up where it hadn't before, we get offended, or even scared. Personally, I welcome any new word or new word usage that accomplishes some communicative task that had previously been more difficult to accomplish. Sometimes things even out over the long run. For example, the word "awful" (probably spelled "aweful"), used to mean "that which fills me with awe." Cathedrals used to be awful; now it's the sermons. Once "awful" descended to meaning no more than "really bad" or just "very" -- ("That's an awful shame" or "I feel awfully bad") -- we had no single word that helped us describe that walking-into-a-particular-cathedral-for-the-first-time experience. That sad state lasted more than half a century. But then Generation X filled the gap by creating a new derivative to do the job -- "awesome." Many people were highly turned off by the term when it made its first fad entance; but I was delighted to see young people trying to express an emotion for which our language no longer had a word. That's just awful! (So I meant "awesome." Sue me.)
The major problem with the non-backward-linking "so" becoming ubiquitous at the beginnings of written sentences, I think, has nothing to do with language purity. It has, instead, to do with the interruption it would constantly cause in the reader expectation process. When you begin reading "the next" sentence in a text, one of your major concerns is to be told, as quickly as possible, how this new sentence is meant to be connected back to the one you just finished reading. The first word or phrase than CAN be linked back WILL be linked back. "So" looks and sounds like a backward-linker. If a reader tries to make that linkage and fails (because this "so" was one of those new "so's," just there for the false-intellectual puffery of it all), the reader's sentence-reading energy is depleted by that failure. If this happens a lot, it could e very destructive of the reader's attempt to learn what the text presumably has to teach. So that's why it would be bad.
So thanks for the interesting question.
Soly yours,
George
So what do you think about "so"?
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