My husband’s temper noticeably improved when we had that BBC strike, when there were fewer irritants from nettle-beds such as Today.
My husband’s temper noticeably improved when we had that BBC strike, when there were fewer irritants from nettle-beds such as Today. But he’s over it now, and cursing the smallest, most niggling annoyance yet broadcast: the word so.
Instead of well, it is used as a mere preliminary utterance to interviewees, with perhaps a hint of challenge. This is what my husband finds more and more annoying as the cumulative count increases. ‘So and so,’ he shouts at the wireless, still surprised at the ineffectiveness of his intervention.
It is not as though so is new as a conjunction. The Oxford English Dictionary expends 30,000 words discussing this little word, in all its nuances, from Caedmon’s Hymn in the year 700 to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So how have we got to the infuriating wireless usage?
C. S. Lewis, in a lecture from 1950 generally playing down the literary impact of the Authorised Version of the Bible, asks whether Bunyan was influenced by the AV in using so to introduce a step in a narrative: ‘So Mistrust and Timorous ran down the hill, and Christian went on his way.’ He acknowledges that the AV does use so in this way, but says it is ‘not very common’. Looking through the 50 chapters of Genesis, I found eight examples (discounting so in other senses), from the sixth verse: ‘So God created man’, to the last: ‘So Joseph died.’ By comparison, there are hundreds of verses introduced by the word and. It is the norm.
Lewis remarks that the narrative so is ‘far commoner in Malory’. He is right, as one would expect. While in the 40,000 words of Genesis, so is used thus eight times, in only the 1,350 words of the first two chapters of Le Morte d’Arthur (as edited by Caxton), so is used in this way 11 times (against and 13 times).
The people that my husband shouts at on the wireless do not use so as a transitional marker in narrative; they use it at the beginning of their remarks. This is what Samuel Foote did at the beginning of his famous piece of nonsense: ‘So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie.’ To him it was obviously nonsensical to begin a speech thus. No longer.
Comments