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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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. :)

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