So .. here’s a question: Have you noticed that tech workers start a lot of their sentences with the word, “So…?”
Is it just me? Because I started to notice this around 1997 or so, when dot com companies started gaining in stature, importance, and wealth.
Tech veterans, recent hires, even people who left other careers to jump on the tech bandwagon would answer questions starting with the word “so.” As in, “So, what we do is strictly B-to-B,” or, “So .. I can’t tell you much about our upcoming release, except that it will radically change the way business is done.”
To be fair, it wasn’t just dot com workers. Some people I knew at chip companies, video game companies, and others, they would give me the “so,” too, but dot commers, that’s where you’d get it the most. It lasted through the boom, even the bust. Today, you’ll still hear it. Ask a question, and get a “So…” to start the response. I don’t get it from most other careers. Finance? Automotive? No “so.” Same with politicians. I’ve listened for it, but it’s not there. You don’t hear it from Clergy, either. In my experience, at least, it’s a tech thing.
So .. why? If I had to come up with an answer, it would be this: Some tech workers will use the “So..” as a way to take a little extra time before they answer your question. To formulate the answer. I’ve noticed that sometimes the “so” is delivered quickly, and sometimes it lingers. Like, if it’s taking a long time to figure out how to make you understand the answer, you’ll get a long “so…..” Try it. Ask something easy, and you’ll get a quick “So…” directly followed by an answer. Ask a tough one, though (“How does your product change the game?” “How will you reach other markets?” “How will your company actually make money”), and you’re in for a pause after your “So..” Sometimes a long pause.
That means the person is thinking – thinking of a way to make this understandable for you.
Now, I’m not taking credit for discovering this. It couldn’t be just me, even back in the ’90′s, noticing this. In fact, in 2002, Mark Leibovich, in his excellent book, “The New Imperialists” (Prentice Hall Press) wonders about this as well. After visiting the offices of Amazon.com to write about founder Jeff Bezos, Leibovich notices “about Bezos and his Amazon team… that they always seem to start their answers with the word “So.”" When I read this, I felt vindicated. Leibovich even offers a possible reason: “The “so’s” imply the instant certainty of their positions.” Yes! And if they’re certain that you won’t quite understand that position, you’ll get a “So..” followed by the pause.
Not having the guts to write Mr. Leibovich about his theory, I sat on this awhile, secure in the knowledge that an actual author (and researcher) had come to the same conclusion as I. The Silicon Valley is, indeed, full of Just “So” Stories. But then, the moment of truth. Not long ago, while interviewing an engineer at a world-renowned dot com giant, I heard this behind me, between two employees of the company:
So…what?
Are Minnesota Department of Wildlife Officers considered tech workers?
Actually heard by me on what passes for a lake in Minnesota:
“So, do you all have your fishing licenses, then?”
“So, do you have your life preservers, then?”
“So, do you have an oar in your boat, then?”
“So, have you been catching any fish, then?”
Just saying….
An annoying and useless linguistic tic that marks its infectees as trend victims.
Just a habit signifying nothing really. Members of a “comunity” just pick up shard speech habits. Many examples in the African American “community”, Know what I’m sayin’?
I worked in the tech sector during the dot-com boom and noticed exactly the same thing. The first time I heard it was when I was visiting Sun Microsystems.
I have no idea where it came from, but many of my programmer friends talk that way. I think it’s just a crutch word.
Heh, I do this all the time. I started my professional life as a developer, and now I work in marketing for a software firm.
In addition to “so”, there is “actually” and for both tech and non-tech, “you know”. These are filler words for when we speak before we think. The filler words are also used to hold the floor when speaking, especially with younger workers. Silence invites the other person to speak. “So”, “actually” and “you know” fill up silent periods and help “hold the floor”.
I have heard it from doctors, too, in answer to a medical question from a patient.
I noticed myself doing this after living in Japan for a while. My boss, Mr Furakawa would start most sentences with “Anno, …” which I took to mean “so” or “well.”
After a while, I was doing it myself. It’s a great replacement for my previous stall word, which was “Ummm, …”
Russ:
At the age of 2 may son would start most sentences with “Actually, …”. My Mother asked where it came from prompting me realize how often I used that word, often to correct my son.
At 5 he still uses it. His use has lead to the response “Don’t ‘actually’ me”.
This is great! So…I too feel vindicated!
I worked in the corporate appraisal world for awhile doing industrial and financial appraisal work. All my co-workers were financial geeks or former industrial engineers or just blue collar guys who moved out of the factory into the numbers game. I never heard “So” to start a sentence. I found my way into software QA in the late 90s at Lotus, which was still quasi-independent from IBM at the time, and every weekly meeting would begin with “So.” I remember telling my wife to be how bizarre it was. Until of course, I eventually adopted the habit and I can’t go a paragraph without using it incorrectly. So, I’m still in IT and can safely say that this odd habit has not gone away at all.
I thought it was more of a California characteristic than anything particular to the computer industry.
Whenever I hear someone start a sentence with “So…” I am reminded of Alicia Silverstone in the movie “Clueless” in her debate class taught by Wallace Shawn.
Actually, sentences starting with “actually” are more irritating. And there’s a sense in which academics who start sentences with “there’s a sense in which” are also irritating.
And I think we need to reach out to vendors who e-mail us and say “we’ll reach out to so & so early next week.” I suggest reaching with a solid jab . . .
When I find myself falling into this habit, it’s usually when I want to explain something that’s long, complex, or both. In particular, I use it when I’m trying to express complex tech terms to non-techs, especially if I need to lay a foundation or set up an analogy as part of the explanation. It’s a string of So’s, usually culminating in one or more Then’s.
You noticed that one segment of the population has settled on a hesitation noise that happens to be a word. Valley girls had “like”, and most of the population uses something similar to “uh” or “um”.
As near as I can tell, we only get these ‘news’ stories about hesitation noises that correspond to words, as what journalist would write an article about the sound “uhhhh”?
It’s because so many of us are/were young, native Californians and that’s how we talk.
I had a co-worker, that while he was thinking in mid-sentence, would “dudududududu” like a typewriter. Thinking and talking aren’t something everybody can do simultaneously. But i had a 4th grade teacher that would equate that silent moment to compose a thought as being a symptom of being dumb, started filling in the space with “like,” and thankfully realized later in life that if you don’t have enough of somebody’s attention that you have to verbally remind them you are still there, then its probably not a conversation worth being in in the first place. Mistaking the instant answers to a trivia question (What year did columbus discover america? kyle?) with an answer that requires “original” thought (If Columbus were alive today, would he be an explorer or a pizza delivery driver?) as a sign of intelligence. Churchill didn’t stutter when he was giving a rehearsed speech either. Then again, if you are silent in the era of cell phones, you get that nasty “can you hear me?” right as you were about to induce the secret of eternal youth. Talk on the phone too much and you become deaf to non-verbal communication, and talk like the person in front of you is hard of hearing. Slloooowww and LOUD and De-Lib-Er-Ate. Can you dig it? I grok.
Lazarus Long had the same tick. Maybe it’s not a coincidence.
Like Letalis Maximus, it also struck me as a Midwestern-ism rather than a tech-ism. In my mind it’s mostly used as a marker for the beginning of an anecdote (“So, here I was in my cubicle, just sitting there, when these three guys walked in…”) where it has a kind of “this is the way it is/was” vibe.
way, way back when in High School, we called this an APP. Anticipated Profundity Phenomena … meaning you were gathering your thoughts. We needled people mercilessly for doing it. “So…” ‘Yeah, so what?’ Timeline wise that was the early 80′s.
Without filler, language comes to a halt, pauses are in the wrong place, and people fail to connect.
so what.
big deal.
I’ve been in IT for 35 years, but I’ve been out of Silicon Valley for 20 years and stay completely away from the dot-com boom (and bust). The first time I heard this was reading a deposition transcript on an IT litigation case where I was the expert witness for one side. I then encountered it with some IT people involved in a subsequent case. Until I read this article, I assumed it was a regionalism, since all the people using it had ties back to the NJ/NY/CT area.
The pattern seems pretty clear:
First party: ?
Second party: So, .
First party: ?
Second party: So, .
First party: ?
Second party: So, .
…ad infinitum.
As such, it’s usage is different than “actually” or “you know”. “Actually” almost always indicates some contradiction or clarification of something the other party has stated or what both parties had earlier agreed upon, while “you know” can show up anywhere in the sentence (multiple times, even) and really is just filler (such as “like”, “uh”, etc.).
“So, …” is always at the start, and if someone uses it, then tend to us it constantly, even when they are bright, articulate, and know the answer, so it doesn’t really seem to function as a stall or fill word. I tend to agree with #3, namely that it’s a linguistic tic or affectation. ..bruce..
I moved from the West Coast, where, indeed, “so…” is the word, to the East Coast, where it’s “basically…”.
Michael Lewis observed the “So…” phenomenon in _The New New Thing_, published 1999. I think it’s because techies are used to people not following their trains of thought, so they lay out them in series.
I think that “so” also serves the same purpose as the little hourglass in Windows or the spinning beach ball on the MacOS – it’s a way of letting the person know that you are working on a response even though you aren’t blurting it out immediately.
This certainly doesn’t apply for conversations begun with “so.” I think those are often done to imply that the conversation relates to an on-going topic. “(We left this up in the air yesterday) So… here’s my response.”
When I write on my blog, I emply “so” at the beginning of a sentence as a way to signify to the reader “I know you’ve been thinking about this also…”
At least, those are some of the reasons I do it.
So, the third paragraph should begin “When I write on my blog, I *employ*…”
Consider first the justifiable use of “So, …” as the beginning of a conversational sentence. It indicates that the statement to follow is a conclusion derived by reason and logic from what has immediately preceded.
“The toaster isn’t working.”
“Well, it needs electricity to work.”
“But it’s plugged in, and it worked earlier.”
“So, we should check the circuit breaker.”
We attack complex problems and issues through chains of observation and deduction; you may hear “So, …” when two people cooperate in such work. Presenting the results to others follows a similar pattern as the speaker leads the listener through his reasoning to its conclusion; here the speaker may even finish with the word alone, leaving a pause for the other to fill.
So, it may be that “So, …” often devolves into a verbal tic through frequent legitimate use or exposure. We’re all subject to such laziness, y’know?
A less defensible use arises when one wishes to assign an unfounded authority of reason to his forthcoming utterance. I fear this is more often the case; that a habit of beginning sentences with “So, …” betrays an unconscious desire to place one’s thought above the test of observation and reason. Arrogance is at least as common as laziness.
Well…
Unintentionally funny typo.
Speaking of verbal tics, “community” is severely worn out, and in dire need of a trip to the glue factory.
I work in IT in a very large telecom company, and through the course of a business day have occasion to speak to people from all over the US. I haven’t paid attention to the incidence of “So” in a conversation, but I can attest definitively that “Actually” is a very widespread phenomenon and is rarely used in the context of a contradiction or correction.
Me: “What do you need?”
Them: “Actually, I need such-and-such.”
I notice it’s most prevalent in Indian programmers and technicians, the sort who are in the US on work visas–it’s literally almost a 100% rate of occurance that a question’s answer begins with “Actually”. Because it was universal among the Indian workers and occured with much less frequency among American ones, I assumed the “actually” was an artifact of the process of learning English. Now I’m not so sure.
Tech people are logical, think in well-ordered trains of thought. “So” is a continuation, an artificial construct to introduce a semblance of consequentiality, to relate to the previous sentence. It is a comfort word.
Ironically, the post highlights one of the verbal tics that drives me crazy: starting declarative sentences with relative pronouns.
“What we’re trying to do is…” instead of “We’re trying to…”
And my very favorite, “Is what I’m trying to do is, is …” Aaaagh!
Letalis Maximus summed up my confusion about this column. As a native Minnesotan I’ve heard sentences that started with “So,” all my life, and would never have noticed it as anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps the speech pattern spread to the larger tech community from former employees of Control Data, Sperry Univac, Honeywell, Etc.
I can’t tell you how cool it is to find out that you’ve
all heard this, too. I admit, I hear myself doing
it sometimes. Trying to break that habit right away.
-Scott
No, I have not. It is probably a generational or regional thing.
I do notice the Japanese doing it. Eeto nee.. So desu ka? Phonetic ellipses is probably the way to describe it. It’s fine, when it is a placeholder for thought.
I think it’s you. Years ago while sitting in a bar in Indiana I struck up a conversation with guy sitting next to me. We talked about many things and I mentioned that I was from Pennsylvania. To be funny, I ended many sentences in the conversation with an “eh”. After about a half hour the guy asked me if I ever noticed that everybody from Canada and Pennsylvania end their sentences with “eh”. So …
If you want examples of this idiomatic speech pattern, view just about any video from Microsoft’s Channel 9 video blog site here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/
Just about every technical video, either the interviewer or interviewee starts every answer with ‘So…’
Speaking of geek speak, is anyone else annoyed when geeks speak of an “install,” or is that just me?
Occam’s Beard: It’s just you. Love your name.
I believe this is in part an occupational thing. The modern techies, at least indirectly, are descended from the originals: computer programmers in the 70s and early 80s. Those people were trained with flowcharts (remember those?). They learned to think very linearly. You go from A to either B or C, and then proceed from there. At each point in the flowchart, you have several choices, and you make one based on circumstances. After each choice, you proceed, and it would be reasonable to say something like “So, **** is our next decision”. They are trained to proceed from point to point in an orderly fashion, and think their way through things…and it’s become instinctive, the way they run their lives. Now, I think it’s pervaded society pretty thoroughly (note the Game warden reference above). Not exactly a bad thing, just interesting.
As someone who used to do a lot of tech work mainly in speaking with customers the word “so” also found itself into my vocabulary and while I think it may be used as a filler while reflecting I think it also comes into usage because the one providing the info is also trying to make sure the one asking for help is on the same page. So much tech lingo is developed out of the need to discover what the other knows and not assume anything. Much of the necessary questions can easily begin with “so, this is what you are describing?” “so, this is how you can reproduce it?”, etc. To me, it seems like it would easily evolve to using “so” in other contexts.
Techies use it because the people they are talking to are typically not as bright as they are or are often ignorant of the subject. So, they interject little meaningless noises to slow down the communication process and provide a space where they can see if their audience is keeping up. Parents also use this technique when talking to their children about something important that they know the child may not understand.
So, do you understand why you can’t clean grandma’s teeth with Tidy Bowl now?
It is a form of asking “are we all in agreement” or “is everyone still following along?” It can also be used as a synonym for “thus.” Since techies tend to think logically, whatever they are saying is often the result of an argument already begun in their heads. “So” merely introduces the conclusion for public consumption.
Obama uses “umm” for exactly the opposite reason. He knows what he is saying is pap and likely contradicts something he said only a paragraph before (we are broke — blah, blah, blah— we must nationalize health care) so he inserts nonsense noises to allow him time to sculpt a more beautiful package to wrap around whatever bit of idiocy he is promoting at the time. He knows he can’t square the circle logically but if he wraps a pretty enough bow around it no one will call him on his premise. “So” is not an option for him because it would change the mode in which people are listening from an emotional one to a logical one.
The Japanese boss of my engineering department would listen to guys like Obama and respond with the stock phrase “that has no meaning.” We might say “content free” in the US but it is nice to know that the ability to spot BS seems to be universal.
I’m a dot-com IT worker in telecom and I do this, I’ve even noticed that I do it, I even do it when I type blog posts, but I was never sure why. Interesting theory.
I’ve noticed this among mathematicians as well.
Fascinating! I’ve been a techie since practically birth and had not noticed this. However, after reading the article I can dimly recall past conversations and think you may be right. I’ll have to monitor my own speech now to be sure!
A hypothesis for you based on some of these dim recollections:
Techies frequently find themselves in situations where they have to create analogies between tech-stuff and non-tech-stuff. As with all analogies this is an imperfect process. It often results in a conversation where you try to home-in on a true understanding between parties. I think ‘So’ is just a convention to move the conversation along.
ex. A business ops person may say ‘My business is too restricted, we need to operate anywhere.’ A very broad statement. I need to translate it to something technically actionable. Does he want to build his operation on Mars? Probably not. But, I may know his sales team is complaining about new implementation time lines in rural US. I may respond, ‘So, you want IT to have better speed to market in rural areas’ Without ‘So’ there may be some subtle negative connotations. If I’m wrong and make a declarative statement that person might think I’m not listening or feel that I’m too presumptuous about his business. Yes, there are other ways to phrase this without ‘So’. It could start with “Do you mean…” or like variants. However, ‘So’ is short and easy. It also builds confidence in the other party if my assumption is right, while leaving wiggle-room if I’m off a bit. Its a method to both make a declarative while also asking a question.
I also think once something like this enters common usage people tend to pick up on it subconsciously to fit in. I know I tend to slip back to my NY accent when talking to NY’ers, while I’ll go a bit southern when speaking to offices in Georgia. Its not something I do purposefully, it just happens…
I first noticed this at a conference at Google, several years ago.
It reinforced the impression that many of the young graduates there were living in a bubble, and had little idea how they were perceived by people from the outside.
So [as a logical conclusion from data to which you may or may not be privy] …
.
Techies also have an obnoxious habit of appending “right?” to every other sentence. For example: “So, Twitter is super cool, right?”
For what it’s worth –
Seamus Heaney’s new translation of the classic “Beowulf” begins with the word “So.”
It started in the valley at the height of the dot com boom, but has long since spread far and wide in all disciplines. Often the same sentence, or adjacent sentences, will end in “right?” Entire conversations play out this way. I switch off the radio when an interview or commentary comes on and the speaker has this tick, because I simply have no interest in what someone so careless might have to say. It is absolutely maddening.
So, um, like, dude … well, you know, right?
So… I think this is actually an example of “Whedonspeak” — quite a few techies were/are really into Joss Whedon shows like Buffy and Firefly, which tend to use this sort of dialogue quite a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joss_Whedon#Dialogue
If you look through the scripts for Buffy and Firefly, you find quite a few “So…” examples:
http://www.buffy-vs-angel.com/guide.shtml
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/firefly/
In Trinidad and Tobago, “so” is often used at the end of a sentence, as in “Do it so.”
So . . . it’s like the Valley Girl ‘like’, so?
I lean towards the theory that this is a way of talking down to a lower life form. When I worked in the Bay Area, I can’t recall ever starting a conversation with my fellow techies with, “So” or any of them doing likewise. But then again, all being on the same rarified plane of existence, there was no need to do so!
so, we don’t have anything else to write about eh? i wonder about American English, and how it seems to be a living entity, with new words coming into existence. and old ones taking on new meanings. bad is good and what was the word in the 80′s, rad…props to you for being a grammar nazi.
I had the misfortune of watching “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” a few months ago when one of the journalists interviewed Christina Romer (one of Obama’s financial gurus). EVERY question she answered started with a “So…” By the end of the interview, I desperately desired to choke the living s*** out of her! It was horrifyingly annoying! I’m sure that you could find that interview on PBS’ website if you feel like getting really pissed off.
A couple of weeks after that first interview, she was on the show again. I didn’t notice her say THE WORD one time during that interview. I feel confident that Obama had either seen the previous interview or had been told how annoying it was and had told Mrs. Romer to knock it off.
regards
I disagree that “so…” is just a pause to buy time while thinking. I believe it actually serves a syntactic purpose. “So…” is often used as shorthand for, “In order to understand the point I’m about to make, you first must understand this precuror.”
Example: “So, it rains a lot in England, this is why we’re investing heavily in umbrellas.”
In this sense, “So…” is being used to establish context. You’ll find it often used for establishing setting in sentences like this:
“So, we were walking through the park, when…” Again, “So…” is used to define a context for the following statements to be properly understood.
“Actually…” is similar. You could just say, “It rains a lot in Slough” as uncontested exposition. But consider the change when so prefixed: “Actually, it rains a lot in Slough.” Immediately there is a connotation of controversy, as though the statement were being offered in rebuttal to an unstated assumption or conventional wisdom.
Again, we are establishing a useful and deliberate context (dialectical, in this case), much more than simply pausing for thought or sounding pompous.
At least, that’s my 2p
“So”… story-izes their answer. Its a way of the speaker feeling one up on you and you one down. It changes the simple bit of information you asked about into a whole story that you, as listener, are outside of and unaware of. It shifts you subtly from slightly inquisitive to somewhat helpless. But of course its an illusion and doesn’t make their schpiel any more or less accurate. Alongside this, yes its a crutch word. Yes it buys time. But more importantly, it tries adds authority to their statement. I have less respect for an answer that starts with “So” and even less for the speaker who uses it habitually.
With politicians it’s “At the end of the day…”
Or, “Frankly…”
With commentators on TV, it’s almost always “Well,…”
and this is what technical writers are for. I study my butt off to fix such crap in their makeshift manuals and documents.
Chester, I cop to the TV commentators.
That’s another blog post …
-scott
John, it’s not just American English. British techies have been struck with the “So” bug too.
“With commentators on TV, it’s almost always “Well,…”
The best example of this – well, the funniest – is Scots Gaelic TV. I don’t speak the language myself, but the answer to every question begins, “Well…”.
My impression of my own use of the word is that I use it as an instantiator. To flesh the word out in a way: I need a reason to initiate a response, so here it is..
Note this is not a complete treatment.
#49. Joel, my experience with those who append ‘right?’ to their statements are those who are technically deficient. They hope that the one to whom they are offering their opinion [I mean 'guess'] will only remember the times they guessed correctly. I had a technician who did that a lot and was usually not ‘right’.
Watch out for people who begin an answer to a question you asked them with “To be honest with you…” When I hear that, I infer that my interlocutor is not always in the habit of speaking honestly.
@55. Gringo:
In Trinidad and Tobago, “so” is often used at the end of a sentence, as in “Do it so.”
And Jean-Luc Picard always said “Make it so”.
Seriously, I thought tech workers started every sentence with “you just…”, at least when they are trying to teach you how to do something on the computer.
What I hate more than “So,…” is a “or whatnot” at the end of a sentence.
Sitting behind me on the bus recently were two bubbly young women who could not say three words in succession without one of them being “like.” What struck me was my own sense of discombobulation when one of them actually used the word “like” correctly. She said “I used to like him,” but it came sandwiched between a flurry of filler like’s…as in “But it’s like, you know, like, I used to like him, but like, now he’s really like, so like full of himself.”
It definitely illustrates the inability of todays kids to use language correctly as an efficient but expressive tool of communication. The filler words are to compensate for the fact that their mental development has been stunted throughout childhood, a consequence of the progressive style of teaching now favored in public schools and an increasingly inane and anti-intellectual mass media culture. They simply can’t think fast enough to keep up with the speed of speech, so they insert a bunch of linguistic spacers to pad it out.
I would be interested to know if their reading skills have been affected in the same way.
One thing I’ve noticed is that customer service representatives are prone to overuse of the word “actually,” as in: “I’m actually looking at your account right now” and “what we can actually do for you is…”
I can’t quite explain why but I suspect it has something to do with them trying to sound more professional and authoratitive than they really are, even though the word does no such thing for them.
One thing I’ve noticed is that customer service representatives are prone to overuse of the word “actually,” as in: “I’m actually looking at your account right now” and “what we can actually do for you is…”
I can’t quite explain why but I suspect it has something to do with them trying to sound more professional and authoritative than they really are, even though the word does no such thing for them.
The aforementioned Michael Lewis wrote on this in Slate
in 1998:
So… What?
http://www.slate.com/id/1002032/
“Computer programmers have a conversational habit which, so far as I know, is peculiar to themselves.”
It may be that ‘like’ isn’t just a filler word for timing purposes. Perhaps it’s also a clue that a child’s mental principle of integration is the similarity relation, rather than the identity relation: IS-LIKE systematically replacing IS. Progressive education blunts minds to only think of things as approximately like other things, never as exactly a specific kind of thing.
“Fail” as a noun is fail.
68: Mary
Good one. I have always that was a very questionable thing to say. Honestly though, (look! it’s happening) who here never dresses up their statements, especially in a professional environment? There is such a thing as tact, which often precludes the honest, but rash things we often want to say.
You’ve convinced me. I am going to start using so at the beginning of sentences instead of um. Maybe I can’t think like a geek but at least now I can talk like one.
FYI, LOL. IYKWIMAITYD.
Another “techie” here chiming in… I say “so” a lot, and for good reason. It’s not just another “ummm”.
Much of my job as a programmer consists of translating vague instructions to codable instructions. We’re trained to think logically and when you think you’ve told us how you want something, you’ve probably said something abstract that we could do a million ways. Usually we know what you mean, but not always, and we MUST make sure we’ve got it right or else we’re not doing our jobs.
The word “so” is a good way of saying, “If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying …” or “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You want …” It can also mean, “therefore,” or “that said,” or “for these reasons,” or “Given those constraints” …
Saying any of those things instead of “so” will just confuse the listener/reader. I don’t care if the word is a pet peeve of yours – I care about explaining and clarifying things in the best way possible to my clients and coworkers. I’m here to get things done. “So” helps.
Terraform;
Good point. Fair enough.
And, to be honest, it’s not really a pet peeve, more like something I’ve been curious about for years.
Writing this (and reading these comments) has cleared things up a ton. Thanks.
-scott
The first person I can remember popularizing the “So…[pause]” was Gary Cole as Bill Lumbergh in the movie Office Space (1999)
budman,
Sorry, I came off too strong in my post (especially the “I don’t care…” part). By “you” I didn’t mean you specifically. I enjoyed the article because I only realized how much we say “so” after I read it – I had never thought about it before.
Good stuff. Will read again.
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