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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

This looks neat. Writing tip for the person speaking (or captioning): starting a sentence with "so" makes you come off like...something I don't have the word for, but it's bad. Don't do it. Condescending? Demeaning? It's like you don't think your audience is capable of following. I had to stop watching after four sentences in a row started that way.

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Or we could not police people's language. "So" is a way to start sentences; like anything else, it can be overused. Just like "like", etc.

There's a good podcast episode from John Mcwhorter on this "So" phenomenon. [0] TL;DL It has some interesting applications (including functioning as a discourse marker), and isn't going away anytime soon.

[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/10/john-mcwhorter-on-s...

Like it or not, perception matters. Take accents as a similar and more obvious case: rural accents will often cause you to be looked down on, and so some find it extremely valuable to deliberately adjust their accent (in some lines of work, it’s pretty much essential to hone a certain accent). So it’s often worth at least contemplating such feedback, if you care about being taken seriously. (But don’t get too hung up on it if you’re just a normal person, either.)

Just to emphasise this the more clearly: I’m talking about facts of life here, not ideals.

Well, I think that starting a sentence with “So” is pretty natural and common. Indeed:

> So it’s often worth at least contemplating such feedback, if you care about being taken seriously.

(Maybe you were intending to joke here, but it still came off as “pretty natural.”)

My use of the word “so” there occurred naturally and I deliberately left it there. However, it’s a different sense of the word “so”: it’s concretely meaning therefore, rather than just being a meaningless filler.

> My use of the word “so” there occurred naturally

What was unnatural about the original use? English isn't exactly standardized, there are plenty of dialects in which "so" is a common way to start a sentence. It might not be part of what you perceive as the prestige[1] dialect, but it's still natural.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_(sociolinguistics)

Nothing. jchw was just querying whether I’d put it in deliberately. I didn’t; it was the wording that flowed out of my fingers (and then I decided to keep it).

Ah. That's my bad. Re-reading, and that makes more sense. Apologies for taking such a hostile interpretation.

This whole convo is reminiscent of the "filler world" phenomenon - e.g. especially if I'm feeling relaxed, I'll say "Like" a lot (I lived in CA for a decade, grew up/went to school in Boston) and I've seen that especially people from Texas will get really hung up on it (ok, big state, like CA, I have double digit individual data on this from a skew of states) and I thought about applying an audio plugin to filter out my "likes" as these convos were in a video game. I'm not sure if I'm right about the "Texas doesn't like the CA slang" hypothesis, but I find it fascinating that people get so hung up on it and expect me to adhere to their expectation of how I should behave. I'm just saying "like" instead of "filler word" of "empty air" - the later of which the critics advocated for. I guess they might just be advocating for open air for others, and I'm overthinking the whole thing.

That doesn't have anything to do with Texas; like, overusage, like, of "like" is, like, incredibly annoying. Growing up in the midwest, we were taught to not use filler words/sounds like "uhh" or "um" in general.

I get the mindset, I just don't hold that view. I also judge people that get so hung up on it, just as they judge me for saying it. Functionally, saying "like" when bridging two parallel thoughts seems reasonable enough to me.

I think it depends a lot on your target audience.

Engineers (at least in my locality in California) tend to prefer direct, casual language and to a great degree even have a grudge against overuse of formal language and formalities. We love things that speak to us in our day to day language.

I suppose if you're pitching a product to lawyers, then sure, bring on the notwithstanding hitherto aforementioned gibberish and I'm sure they'll feel right at home thereinafter. :)

There was an article in Salon (or was it Slate?) in 1996 on beginning sentences in "So".

So, it's interesting it goes that far back.

Update: the language log says it goes back before the 1850s. With an early peak around 1870.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2570

One usage of it that I find particularly annoying is in answer to questions. For instance:

"Where did you go to lunch?"

"So, we headed downtown..."

I think it's aggravating because it feels evasive, as if the person is pretending they're not answering a question and are instead just starting a new story.

thank you, great podcast channel and episode you shared there.

The way it’s used in that video is not uncommon in at least Australian English. It’s largely just a filler when used in this sense.

It's very common in American English as well, and it functions the same way, as a filler. I'm not sure where the OP got the sense that it was condescending.

It's common in the Northern California tech industry. People will prefix questions by saying "Question" or statements with "So". It's sort of phatic, like a header that prepares the listener for what's coming. No one would take offence at it there.

However, I agree that it is out of place in a demonstration video since people are looking for the info in the first place and already know what's coming.

Would you mind sharing where you're from so I know which region I should be careful to not offend people by speaking like this?

It's kind of annoying and bad English, but I don't think it's condescending.

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