So I was thinking, the title ‘Word of the Week’ doesn’t really do justice to this multifunctional little number. I know we’re only a few years in but it has to be a candidate for Word of the Millennium. Having spent most of its life barely noticed amid the infinitives, gerunds and transferred epithets, ‘so’ has enjoyed such a remarkable renaissance in recent years that you can barely go two minutes without hearing it. It’s the verbal equivalent of Mary Berry.
‘So’ has always been a versatile word, able to do a job as an adverb, adjective, pronoun or conjunction. Then, some time around the turn of the millennium, people started using ‘so’ to turn nouns into adjectives. ‘That’s so last century.’
Clever.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Having discovered that this dinky amalgamation of two of the more unremarkable letters of the alphabet had hidden powers, linguistic pioneers began to use it at the beginning of their sentences, like a conjunction between the new sentence and a non-existent preceding sentence.
‘So I’ve just been to the shops.’
The effect was dynamite. By cunningly putting ‘so’ at the beginning of a brand new conversation, you could create the impression that you had already been talking and that the listener must have missed something. ‘So’ became part of the New Labour Third Way of Speaking, which involved putting extraneous words at the beginning of sentences, purely to draw attention to yourself, buy time and sound a bit patronising.
If you’ve hung on to all your old videos of Tony Blair interviews, keep the kids amused tonight by replaying them and counting how many times he begins his answers with ‘Look’. They’ll be asleep in seconds.
So, what does ‘so’ mean?
It can mean lots of things: very, therefore, thus, for that reason, in order that, as stated… lots of things. But there’s one thing that ‘so’ does not mean and that’s ‘a needle pulling thread’. Sorry to disappoint you, Sound of Music fans, but what Maria should have sung was ‘Sol – a bottle of Mexican beer’. But that doesn’t rhyme with ‘jam and bread’, so it really would have brought her back to do, do, do, doh!
The sol-fa scale – Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do – as used on the Continent instead of our A, B, C, D, E, F, G designation for the musical notes, was invented by a sixth century Benedictine monk called Guido d’Arezzo. He had been charged by the Archbishop of Seville with finding a way to write music down so it wouldn’t be lost in the mists of time. He decided to employ an ancient Indian technique of assigning syllables to each note of the scale and used for his key a hymn called Ut Queant Laxis, which goes (altogether now):
Ut queant laxis
resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
The Ut and Si were later changed to Do and Ti in some languages, much to the relief, no doubt, of Rogers and Hammerstein, who would otherwise have been left with something like this.
Ut a word, a funny little word
Re a drop of golden sun
Mi a name I call myself
Fa a long, long way to run
Sol a bottle of Mexican beer
La a note to follow Sol
Si a wet thing full of fish
Which will being us back to Ut, Ut, Ut, Ut…
So that’s not quite as snappy, is it?
