So, this is about the word “so.”

The idea about assertion of logical continuity is interesting.

The rise of “so,” he said via e-mail, is “another symptom that our communication and conversational lives are chopped up and discontinuous in actual fact, but that we try in several ways to sew them together in order to create a continuous experience.”

I hear it a lot in radio interviews, like..

A: And it was around that time that you discovered that 8 is greater than 7?

B: So, next we started looking into relationships between single digit numbers, which...

It's like a disguised sense of alarm that the partner in the dialogue may have ruptured the narrative (which is what interviewers are paid to do, politely) and that continuity needs to be reasserted. It's necessary with technical subjects where if you don't introduce concepts in careful sequence then the meaning completely breaks down.

I will sometimes compose an email, then while editing realize I've started most of the paragraphs with "so".

And if you weren't already aware of this tic, you may become hypersensitive to it for a while. :-)