Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 June 4

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June 4

So

See the first post in Talk:March for Our Lives#Road to Change

"So, today some of the students with March for our Lives announced they were doing a road tour to encourage people to vote, and to challenge the NRA."

What is the point of the word "So" there?

I am of mature years. I am slowly getting used to people forty or more years younger than me beginning sentences with "So" in spoken English. It just seems like another redundant filler, like "Um". But in written English? HiLo48 (talk) 23:06, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm sure that beginning a sentence with a conjunction has always been standard in English, just like ending a sentence with a preposition. I'm not sure about beginning a sentence with a conjunction, but I'm sure that the idea that ending a sentence with a preposition should be bad grammar started out as wanting English grammar to be like Latin grammar, and in Latin sentences never end with prepositions. I would like to know if anyone has an opinion on a similar statement on starting a sentence with a conjunction. Georgia guy (talk) 23:10, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Here is an article from NPR on the subject: So, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'? Notice that the article says this construction is no more common now than it was 50 or 100 years ago. BTW, I'm just shy of 75, so I'm not a young whippersnapper, but the construction does not bother me. - Donald Albury 23:28, 4 June 2018 (UTC) (Edited 23:34, 4 June 2018 (UTC))

Thanks for the grammar and history lessons folks, but I will just repeat my question, with bolding - "What is the point of the word "So" there?" HiLo48 (talk) 23:39, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

It's an introductory interjection signifying that the speaker (or writer) wants everyone to pay attention (where before the audience/readership's attentions may, at least notionally, have been divided): it may carry some implication of a new topic being introduced. Compare the word "Hwæt" used to commence Beowulf around thirteen hundred years ago –

Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in ġēar-dagum / þēod-cyninga þrymm ġefrūġnon / hū þā æþelingas ellen fremedon.

– which was (apparently) a convention of bards, skalds, etc. of those times. Similarly used words include "Lo!", "Hark!" (see much 19th-century poetry), "Howay!" (see some renditions of The Lambton Worm), "Listen up!" etc. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.204.152.76 (talk) 23:58, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

In fact, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf translates the first word Hwæt as "So":

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

And he devotes a paragraph of the introduction explaining his choice of this word, rather than the more traditional "Lo", "Hark", "Behold", etc. CodeTalker (talk) 04:00, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Beat me to it. As I was going to say before the edit conflict, "The purpose of 'so' (and other filler words) at the beginning of a sentence is to signal that you are about to say something. Putting a meaningless word in front of a sentence alerts listeners to pay attention to you. Such filler words are common in unrehearsed speech, but you usually filter them out. Filler words do not have meaning, but help structure conversations." - Donald Albury 00:17, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

As I recall, the first sentence in Slaughterhouse Five is "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." There's no practical need for "Listen" there. But it's kind of an attention-getter. As would be "So" except he's already made extensive use of that in the catchphrase "So it goes." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:25, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm not seeing a "Road to Change" section on the talk page, so can't see the full context. The folks above are probably correct, but I believe that many instances of "So..." are shorter versions of "Therefore...". In context it should read like <problems being listed> <So> <steps to fix the problem>, where "So" functions to tell the listener/reader that the topic has shifted from problems to solutions. Matt Deres (talk) 14:26, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

No, you're not seeing it because it was deleted. Maybe the author attracted the wrong kind of attention. HiLo48 (talk) 02:06, 11 June 2018 (UTC)