I agree with pulykamell.
I also find it interesting that management staff at my work, use this word constantly. While the lower or blue collars hardly ever use it at all.
Single-sentence paragraphs have always been common in newspaper writing, and they are perfectly appropriate for anything that will be read in narrow-column format, such as on your phone.
Oh come on!
I came close. Didn’t I?
One reason why it is popular is because of text messaging. When sending a text message, many people prefer to type “gonna” instead of “going to”.
Same goes for “wanna”.
I don’t know if I overuse the word or not. I’ll have to ask my SO.
“So after dinner you want some kugel maybe?” just doesn’t have the impact without the “so.”
And neither does “So a rabbi, a minister, and a priest walk into a bar…”
I accept your challenge FCM. It’s one of my lazy habits that needs to go away.
Right – people are using so as a discourse marker for what English speakers normally have been doing with well. That’s clear to everyone, I think. We all get that.
The question is why? Why use so, when we have well, which has suitably served this purpose for probably centuries?
My personal theory–which I have mentioned before in the other threads–is that it has come from college educated people. Often college lectures address large topics, which span over several class meetings. So at the beginning of a lecture which is following from a previous class, the professor will start by saying So,. He or she does this to indicate that the present lecture is actually a continuation of the topic from the previous lecture. For example, in a series of lectures on WWII, a professor might open a lecture by saying, “So, in the spring of 1942, the Germans have captured territory in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic republics.” The professor then goes on to talk about the Battle of Stalingrad, or something.
An eighteen-year-old freshman, not particularly interested in WWII, and–more importantly–inexperienced in the language of academic discourse, will hear this simply as “the way smart people start off when they are going to impart important knowledge.” With time they generalize this, and so, after they graduate and find themselves in some kind of position where someone is asking them questions, they try to constitute themselves as expert–like their previous professors–by mechanically beginning their answers with so.
I’d be happy with getting rid of the vapid chef-speak.
“So you have before you an oven roasted quail with a delicate house-made gremolata…”
“So I have made for you a salad of locally harvested organic Kentucky blue grass and dent d’leon blossoms…”
So what? Let’s eat!
I’m not sure I buy that theory, but I’m willing to consider it. I did go to college, but I don’t recall “so” being used much by professors. I can’t prove it, though, and you can say that I subconsciously internalized it, but I honestly don’t think so.
But this is not what we’re talking about with regard to the word so. In this case, the chef is connecting the process of preparing and cooking with the dish which you now see. This is a “normal” way of using so: to indicate a result of something which has previously been referenced in the discourse.
You may have issues with the other terms–the lexicon of “chef-speak” (e.g., delicate, house-made, etc.)–but the use of so in this example is standard.
I admit I overuse “so” but I at least use it correctly.
Well, this is just for me my gut intuition, and, as you say, there’s no real way of testing it. It is clear, though, that the “problematic” increase in the use of so is a relatively recent thing, which can be documented by simply listening to or reading transcripts of interviews of “experts” over the last few decades [CAVEAT: A simplistic google or n-gram search isn’t going to be enough. One has to do a real discourse analysis.]
In post #15 guizot gave a nice example of what s/he’s beefing about. (Which with I agree FTR.) I’m not sure that FCM’s OP was the same beef.
As a consequence of the foregoing (aka “So” :)) I wonder how many of us are talking past one another and unwittingly supporting or denigrating very different use cases for “so”?
I for one look forward to clarification from our esteemed OP.
I think “well” serves a slightly different purpose from “so”.
As I said above, I think “so” has come to indicate, “I’m going to establish context before telling you something.”
On the other hand, “well” often seems to mean, “I’m going to tell you something, but it isn’t the whole story”, or “I’m going to respond, but your question suggests that you are missing or misinterpreting some information.” It doesn’t carry the same implication that the response will contain the context, it just indicates that there is a contextual disconnect that may need to be resolved. If the response does contain the context, it tends to follow the direct answer, rather than precede it, as is generally the case with “so”.
I’ll admit that it’s a subtle distinction, but I think each marker conveys information in the relevance channel. (The fact that both are sometimes used as delays, much like less articulate fillers, muddies the water a bit.)
Again, as with the chef case, I think it should be clear this is NOT what we’re talking about here. Look at the example conversation in post #15, and Balance’s explanation in post #17. They are NOT the same usage as this case.
I agree with you that–in the kugel example–it’s standard and useful. It’s just a completely different discourse marker, because there is prior, contextualized topic (namely, the previous dinner). If you look at the example in post #15, each question is a NEW topic, but the speaker still opens with so.
As for the case of “So a _____, a ______ and a ____________ walk into a bar” – that’s a pro forma, formalized, stock joke opening line, the implication being that it is a continuation of a series of jokes.
And–most obviously–the joke isn’t an answer to an interviewer’s question.
Yes, that’s true, it’s slightly different. More importantly, though, in every case of this problematic use of so, well could be used, and often is. In the example from the Lake Superior State site:
A: How did you learn to play the piano?
B: So my dad was in a classical music club.
Compare:
A: How did you learn to play the piano?
B: Well, my dad was in a classical music club…
The difference is that well is used to lower register (and possibly mark some degree of familiarity between the two speakers), while so is used–in my opinion–as an affectation of expertise.
Yes, that would be more akin to the “normal” use of so, (and could be contributing to this increase), but in so many of the cases that we collect, what the speaker says subsequently has nothing to do with context. That is, there is no following elaboration–it is the total response.
I don’t disagree with the distinctions called out in Balance’s post #35, but I more often see “well” used in yet another way: as a soft-pedal or to imply the speaker is not endorsing, or even is disowning, the info to follow. e.g.
Dad: “What just happened here? How did the window get broken?”
Kid: “Well, <complicated incompetent kid-level lie>”
Boss: “How can we solve the XYZ account problem?”
Worker: “Well, we could do A. Or B, … or maybe even C.” All said with a flat affect and a tone implying no confidence that any of these solutions will actually work, but only that the worker was obligated to say something less than nonsensical.
That would be, as you say, a problematic usage (in my opinion). However, I find that misuse grating more because the speaker does not follow through with implied contextual information than because of the affectation. If you lead with “so”, I expect to hear a story and will be tempted to fling rotten vegetables if one is not forthcoming.
I’m also less certain than you that it is specifically an affectation of expertise, as opposed to a general effect of newscaster normalization. Common dialects and accents among newscasters exert a sort of gravity*. Many people are influenced by the general impression that this is how informed, serious people who earn their living by talking should speak. People who aren’t good at context in the first place often end up mimicking the talking heads’ usage without understanding it.
*I can attest to this influence firsthand. I’m something of a mimic, and I absorbed it as a child to such an extent that my dialect and accent were almost entirely General American. I only sounded “local” if I deliberately switched registers.
Valid cases–“well” is often used in offering excuses or mitigating circumstances. I think it could be argued that those are extensions of what I described. The little kid lie is offering (false) context to the window incident; alternatively, it could simply be delaying filler as the kid’s mind works on the unnecessarily intricate details of the lie. The worker is implying that the boss is omitting part of the context–the part about the problem probably being unsolvable.
I might be stretching the point though. “Well” is also used in offering compromises, and I’m not sure how to fit that into the relevance framework. As guizot pointed out, “well” has been used as a marker for quite a while; it’s had plenty of time to wallow out the niche.