It’s so annoying

So why do people feel compelled to start every sentence with ‘so’?

We live in the Age of So. Dot Wordsworth commented on it in these pages recently, though was lost for an explanation. The phenomenon was illustrated on Radio 5 Live’s Drive programme a while back, when Peter Allen interviewed Steve Robertson of BT OpenReach about the expansion of superfast broadband.

Allen: ‘What will actually happen?’
Robertson: ‘So, what will happen is that we’re either going to be taking fibre to their home or to their business…’
Allen: ‘And how expensive is all this?’
Robertson: ‘So, we’ve already committed two and a half billion pounds…’

Within minutes listeners were emailing to express irritation at this growing habit of starting every answer with the word ‘so’. Offenders tend to be PR spokesmen — though even politicians are doing it. Witness Grant Shapps on the Today programme, asked about housing benefit changes: ‘So, I think there are three things…’ What’s going on here?

Part of the answer might be the need to belong. ‘It’s called “accommodation”,’ says Dr Penelope Gardner-Chloros, of the department of applied linguistics and communication at Birkbeck College. ‘We accommodate, and converge with, the group of people we want to belong to. Someone using “so” like this may well be doing it because they’ve heard other people doing it. It spreads like the flu.’ This might explain how the So epidemic is spreading, but not how it started. Why use the word this way in the first place?

‘It’s a good way of giving yourself time to think,’ says the PR consultant Cherry Chappell. ‘Even a short word like “so” gives you that fraction of a second you need to plan your answer. And it has a more positive feel than similar mechanisms, such as “let me just say”, “erm” or “like”.