I recently stumbled across a 2010 piece by Anand Giridharadas, who writes the “Currents” column for the Times, on the rise of a new verbal tic: the word “so.” Appended to the front of nearly any spoken sentence, “so” joins the ranks of “um” and “like” as a meaningless place-filler that public speaking gurus will try valiantly to eliminate. Giridharadas believes that “so” is not as meaningless as it may seem, however. He quotes Michael Lewis, the popular author of Moneyball and The Big Short, as writing in 1999 that “When a computer programmer answers a question, he often begins with the word ‘so.'” With the ascendancy of the technology sector, “so” spread to the general population, creating what Giridharadas characterizes as “a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process, proceeding much in the way of software code — if this, then that.”
Attributing broader cultural trends to a specific cause is always risky, and Giridharadas is on firmer ground when he notes that “so” ties what follows it to what has come before. It forges a connection, a cause-and-effect relationship, between one person’s statement and the other person’s response. Conservations are all too often one-sided: I pretend to listen to what you say, but instead of reflecting on your words, my mind is already formulating a rebuttal, just waiting for the chance to express my own opinion. “So” implies that I have heard what you are saying, that your words have influenced mine, when in reality my point was honed and formulated before our exchange even began. “So” eliminates the awkwardness of the non-sequitur. It is a “signal that one’s coming words are chosen for relevance to the listener.” According to one scholar interviewed by Giridharadas, it demonstrates “that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.”
It is not difficult to see the popularity of “so” as an attempt to make up for our increasingly perfunctory communication style. E-mail and text messages don’t allow us to couch our words in body language or facial expressions; all that is left is the word on the page, stripped of any information that might clarify intentions or soften a seemingly caustic remark. “So” seems to be a good-faith offering, an acknowledgment that “I know what you’re saying” or “I follow your reasoning.”
In my own speech, I notice fewer instances of “so” than of that similar transition, “yeah.” Both work as a bridge between your last remark and whatever response has since percolated in my brain. Conversations are not linear exchanges; they rarely amount to the focused give and take of movie dialogue, in which Person A picks up the thread left by Person B and runs with it. Instead, during the silence between our words, my mind operates tangentially, leaping from your lousy day at work to my coworker’s irritating YouTube habit to my own distaste for barking cats and dancing grizzly bears. When I finally get the chance to speak, what I have to say seems be bear little relevance to what came directly before it. The “yeah” habit infects even sui generis comments: it is the preface to everything, even sentences that break the silence. “Yeah, I really need to find some new shoes,” implies an agreement that does not exist, an excuse for broaching an otherwise irrelevant or self-centered topic.
So. Yeah. Neither takes responsibility for the opinions or proclamations to come. Both serve as place holders, updated “likes” or “uhs” for the twenty-first century. The good news may be that, one the trend subsides and technology may make such words more extraneous than ever. After all, when every letter counts, there is not room among 140 characters for filler. Or perhaps we’ll just adapt: Yh, so I’ll c u l8r.
. . . So Well Read. . . 