So at the Beginning of Sentences

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Mary Beth McManus, and I’m from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Hi, Mary Beth, how you doing?

Good.

What’s up?

Well, I was listening to your show on a long drive on my way back from Canada.

About a year or two ago, I noticed someone being interviewed on TV.

She started her answer with the word, so.

And it seemed very odd to me.

It just didn’t feel right.

And I started noticing it on TV a little more.

And a few weeks ago, I noticed a reporter on TV or someone he was interviewing do the same thing.

And to me, it felt very peculiar.

Felt like, okay, he was saying, okay, here’s how I’m going to answer your question instead of just answering the question.

So the word so, I feel, is becoming invasive. I don’t know how you professionals feel about it.

The way this is usually referred to in the linguistic world is sentence initial so, which basically means so at the beginning of a sentence.

And you can actually find some other information we have on this sentence initial so on our website.

And what we’re finding here is that this is a really common usage.

I actually want to quote something from a paper by a woman named Galena Bolden from Rutgers.

And she writes in this paper, so prefacing is recurrently used in context where the activity being launched has been relevantly pending, which is a really complicated way of saying.

In other words, people use so when they’ve been aware that the thing that they’re about to say was going to have to be said.

Like they’re launching into a thing that they had mentally or actually physically prepared, which is why you so often see this in interviews.

And you kind of mentioned this in a couple of different ways that the guy was saying what he was going to say rather than saying it, if that makes sense.

He’s kind of prefacing his comment.

And it’s a real legitimate use of this of so as a conjunction, which is how it’s behaving here.

And it plugs in very well to some other uses of so where I think of the storyteller.

So like let’s say that you’re at the library listening to a storyteller story to kids and she’s like, so here’s a tale of Miss Mousy and how she beat the cat.

Right.

Yeah.

I’ve seen it referred to as a backstory.

So great.

Yes.

I think of it as I think of it as a storyteller.

So but that’s very much the same.

And also it’s very much related to another use of the preposition.

So where, let’s say, you’re helping someone with their homework, and then you say, after you explain all this complicated stuff, you say, so does that make sense?

And what you’re doing here is providing that bridge between an activity or comment to the thing that follows and kind of trying to wrap it up.

You’re looking for the closure of the subject.

And certainly in these interview situations, at least in most of the examples that I see, when someone says, so here’s what we were doing at Microsoft when we built this product, right?

It sounds like what they’re trying to do is assemble all of the data together into a kind of minor narrative arc and just kind of just finish it off and just kind of give the interviewer what they were after.

Aha.

Well, that’s really good to know that it isn’t just me.

Not at all.

Not at all.

Linguists have been all over this.

Yeah, it’s not a crutch word either.

It’s not a filler word.

And if you take it out of the sentences where they use it, the sentences’ meanings shift.

Yeah, I think in a lot of cases it is. I remember as a child it carried a lot of emotion because you would say, so, so what? It bared some emotion and not always in a positive way.

Yeah. So like so many words has lots of different uses here. And we have to be careful to separate those and not think of this as one large monolithic so that is now being misused because it’s not what’s happening. It is not a misuse of so. Just to be clear. It’s not.

Yeah, it conveys a little bit.

I won’t judge anybody anymore.

But yeah, yeah, it depends on context and it conveys a certain kind of meaning, as Grant was saying.

I think of it as replacing well, too.

You know, every time I and we get this question all the time and people often mention interviews on NPR.

Right, because that’s our audience. That’s our that’s our group.

Yeah. But well has kind of fallen away in that.

Right.

Is that is the way that you would begin your sentences, your explanation, you know, your answer to a question.

Yeah, so I kind of get a kick out of just listening when the interviewee takes a breath to figure out if they’re going to say well or so.

And if they’re older, they tend to say well.

Mary Beth, thank you so much for bringing this up.

Okay, thank you.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I just want to make sure that we really got to give a good example of the kind of so that she’s talking about before we move on.

Okay.

Let’s say that you are interviewing someone about a book and you say your new book seems like a real departure from your previous novels.

And then the guest says or the author says, so I was trying to avoid writing another professor falls in love with student story.

Right.

And so they are continuing your thought and kind of saying they’re kind of yes anding you.

They’re confirming your question or the thesis of your question and then supplementing it with information that kind of fills in the details.

Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, I would have said, well, whatever the answer was.

And for me, well often suggests that a contradiction is in the offing and that we might be encountering some kind of resistance to the thesis of the question.

That’s another example of it.

But I think for me, well is sometimes just a warm-up, you know, just kind of a throat clearing.

Well, you could say that.

Yeah, well can be.

But this is a really interesting, again, the phrase that you need to Google to find out tons about this, either from popular treatments to the academic treatments, is sentence initial so, S-O.

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