Well, I mean, so ...
Sunday, May 21, 2017 at 20:01 One of my pet hates at the moment is people starting a sentence with the word "So".
I don't know where it's come from (it's a relatively recent phenomenon) but listen to the radio and I guarantee that, when asked a question, there's a high probability the person will begin their response by saying, "So ..."
It's particularly prevalent amongst broadcast journalists but it's catching on like wildfire and it's really annoying because the word is almost always completely superfluous.
That said, I'm guilty of a few verbal tics myself. A few weeks ago I read a transcript of a radio interview I'd done.
Not only did I unwittingly begin numerous sentences with the words, "I mean", I repeatedly responded to questions by saying, "Well, ..."
Awful.
Anyway, I think I've got "I mean" under control but reading the transcript of the interview I did about vaping last week I'm finding it harder to stop my compulsion to begin replies to questions with the word "Well".
In my defence it's not as bad as saying "er" or "um" over and over again yet that's what many broadcast journalists do all the time.
Honestly, listen to them. How do they keep their jobs? If you can't speak without umming and erring all the time you shouldn't be in broadcasting.
I just wanted to get that off my chest.
Reader Comments (4)
Well, actually, you know, I mean, that is, well, I think actually... (repeat ad lib)
That you notice it now doesn't mean it's new. That's the recency illusion in full bloom, I suggest.
I went to the British National Corpus and searched the string ". So". That returned 29,407 results. Looking at them, I would suggest that sentences starting with "So" were common in the past. (". Therefore" returned 2,200 hits, btw).
"so" seems to have taken over from "well" - I find it really annoying too.
At least people seem to have stopped inflecting upwards at the end of sentences.
One that always makes me smile is when people start a sentence with "Yes, no....." (or more commonly "Yeah, no...").