Sentence-Initial So

We got an email from James Berkholz in Plano, Texas, and he writes,

So, in the last decade, I’ve noticed a trend, often when answering a question in a verbal conversation, to lead off with the word, so, and then answer the question.

I know that it was in isolated usage in previous decades, but it seemed more an affectation of speech, indicating that the speaker was a bit odd, but it wasn’t in common usage.

This drives me crazy.

So should refer to something not used as a throwaway, throat-clearing, verbal crutch.

What James is talking about is when you’re, let’s say we’re doing an interview here, and you say, Grant, what did you do this weekend?

And I say, so we went to the park and we had a picnic.

Right.

And for a lot of people, that so sounds odd because it sounds like you are explaining something.

Yeah, it sounds odd or like James. It drives them crazy.

It’s a continue.

It sounds like you should be continuing a narrative.

Like, so first we went to X.

Right.

And then we went to Y.

And it’s also used, we use it more often when we’re providing a kind of a summary or a conclusion.

Yeah, in place of therefore.

Right.

So in the end, everything turned out fine.

Right.

That so sounds more acceptable.

What’s really interesting is that he’s caught on to a couple different things here.

One, James realizes, and he says this, once you notice these things, these particular interesting things about language, it’s hard to stop noticing them.

You can’t turn off that notice machine, right?

The radar cannot be disabled.

And so that’s one thing.

So then it gives you the false impression that it’s more common because it actually isn’t any more common now than it was a decade ago or 50 years ago.

This use of so, which is called a sentence initial so, and there are a lot of them, but this particular use of so at the beginning of a sentence is well known and well chronicled and documented and historically accurate, grammatically okay, syntactically just fine.

But I think what throws people, I think what they’re confusing here is their own ability to be more aware of language with language itself changing.

That is, James is paying more attention, and so it feels like the language is doing something new, when the language is actually just doing kind of what it always did.

Grant, I have to say, I have this feeling that I hear people beginning sentences with so more often.

And it’s sort of like you can almost picture them holding up their hands, you know, framing whatever they’re talking about.

And it’s sort of a shorthand way of saying, OK, picture this.

And I’m wondering, I mean, I’ve seen different theories floating around that maybe it reflects the fact that we’re in an age of multitasking, you know, where our attention is diverted all different places.

And if you say so, it’s a way of framing the conversation, just sort of detaching from all the other input like texts and computers and other ambient noise.

Now, I don’t know. I mean, but I do feel like I hear it more.

It’s a theory. It might have a little bit of a vogue.

But as far as the linguistic data are concerned, when we analyze the texts of spoken language that people have gathered, it doesn’t appear to be significantly more common now than it used to be.

Now, I say that with a lot of footnotes and caveats and hesitations because we didn’t put these corpora together last week.

They might have data in them from 10 or 15 years ago, but that is the span of linguistic research.

I mean, at that level, when you’re analyzing the things that people tend to do in their spoken language, you can’t do it day by day or even year by year.

You accumulate data over, more likely, over decades, and then you look at it in the aggregate because you’re trying to do linguistic research that covers ages or eons and not, you know, a month, right?

Right.

So I know this is very muddled.

No, no, it makes sense.

And I guess I’m approaching it more from a feeling kind of.

Well, throw out the feeling.

So, if you’d like to talk with us about so or language, give us a call.

877-929-9673.

Or you can send an email, don’t begin it with so, please, words@waywordradio.org.