During the past six months, I have noticed a strangely large percentage of the people I know starting sentences with the word "So". The first time I encountered it was during the in-person interview for my job, and it was so unfamiliar and distinctive, it has struck me as ever stranger and stranger that this pattern seems to have not merely caught on, nor developed, but sprung fully formed from nothingness into the most astounding ubiquity.
I'm certainly old enough to have heard a few trends in speech patterns develop in my lifetime ("like, totally"), but this one was unheard-of one day, and has become everpresent every day since. And, no, I thought at first maybe this is just a linguistic tic amongst the people I work with: but I saw it on the NEWS tonight. It seems to be cropping up all over the place.
I don't mind it. But I'm fascinated, and I want to know why this happened, where it came from, how it's spawned so prolifically. (Prolificly? I'm not looking it up.)
Anyway. So.
2 comments:
I like that ending especially.
So it just happens that, early adopter that I am, I was kicking off entire paragraphs fairly often in the summer and late fall of 2009 with the word "so."
So what?
Hee. I think all of us do it to a certain extent, and it's not something I'd never heard at all before. But there is a definite inflection to the usage I'm talking about, one I've never heard from you. I think it *may* be partially cultivated at my work, but it is something I've heard more - in this specific manner - since starting there. Maybe it's just exposure, but it really seems new to me. And you know me: verbal tic girl. I'm all about the verbal tics.
It's been all I can do not to adopt this one.
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