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So About This Ed Bott Character...

  • Статья

So Ed Bott was wondering why so many Microsoft people start their sentences with the word "so." "So" is a weird word. It tries to mean "apparently" and "greatly" and "thus" all at once. I actually had someone tell me that starting sentences with that word made me sound smarter. I laughed since I view it as an empty filler word -- a Twinkie snack cake in the English language. It's a verbal tic many Microsofties have that gets from one thought into another. It tries to make it sound like we were listening to the last thing you said. (Don't worry: we weren't.)

So why do we use this extra word? Probably because somebody smarter than us did it first and we're just copying them. Rather like the period where so many people ran around imitating a beer commercial by screaming, "Wazzup." You know: people who are smarter than we are.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    So it is a common verbal tic at Carnegie Mellon. That is where I first heard it and I sort of assumed it drifted to Microsoft and other hi-tech companies (I've heard CMU alumni at Sun do the same thing) from CMU. But I could be wrong.
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    So that's really interesting.
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    guilty. picked it up from all the MS stuff i've read. have done some quick proofreads on my own blog posts and seen like 3 sentences in a row start with the word 'so'. don't know how to kick the habit?
  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2006
    After my previous posts on language where several commenters pointed out that language is an evolving...