[etni] Wit from William Safire
- From: "Nancy Peled" <nancybcp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Etni List" <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 10:55:05 +0200
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Dear Etniers,
I hope we all have a few minutes to enjoy the wit and humour of William Safire,
and on a topic we can all relate to!
Enjoy~
Nancy BCP
Language: A word that is, like, so in vogue
Monday, July 26, 2004
So is oh,so 2004. I stole that from Christian Tot's review of a rock concert in
The Washington Times: "Times change, and today's listeners wanna hear Jet, the
Strokes and other, oh,so 2004 music."
.
The hot adverb, used there to emphasize timeliness, is more often used to
signify the out-of-date. On Fox TV, Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio
host, said of the talk about Bill Clinton's autobiography, "The Monica Lewinsky
stuff now really seems so last century." The popularization of this usage may
have begun with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in 1992, when Buffy pointed to a new
jacket and was told: "Please! That's so five minutes ago."
.
Six years later, the media critic Howard Kurtz picked up on that and wrote in
The Washington Post: "The media went wild over the tapes - Monica and Linda
talking about hairstyles. ... Iraq was, like, so five minutes ago." Last year,
commenting on "the dreary corporate governance craze," Gretchen Morgenson of
The New York Times wrote, "Failures at Enron and WorldCom are so five minutes
ago." Recently, commenting on the award by a Scottish heraldic society of a
coat of arms to Colin Powell, Time wrote, "Medals are so last month."
.
The vogue use of so is not limited to time. Mena Suvari, described by Newsweek
as "the thinking man's sex kitten," took a call at a hair salon and said to her
interviewer: "I'm working this call in between my color and toner. That is so
bad. I'm so Hollywood."
.
So we will now take a hard look at so. Though it is used as a conjunction to
mean "consequently" ("I was given this ticket, so I went"), the short, ancient
word also has a dozen meanings as a modifier. These range from "in a specified
way" ("Hold the golf club so") to "in the extent expressed" ("I'm so tired of
Valley talk"), from its kindred "also" ("So do I") to "true" ("Say it ain't so,
Joe").
.
But this quicksilver so gives stylists fits. The preceding paragraph should
begin with "therefore" or "thus"; so in that sense is considered overly
informal to the point of sloppiness. When you mean "accordingly," a fuzzy word
like so doesn't do the semantic trick. So there. (You can use So there, meaning
"Take that!" or "Didn't I tell you?" because it's an idiom, and idioms trump
all rules.)
.
Stylists also hold that so must be followed by that when introducing clauses of
result or purpose. Native speakers argue that we are still zigging when the
rest of the world has zagged. "I want to go home so I can get to bed." Should a
that follow the purposeful so? In speech, no; in writing, yes. In the most
formal writing, use so that so that you can show you know how to behave with
conjunctions in classy, literate company. But when you're talking and don't
need to wear a tie - lose the that. In a generation or so, the writing will
follow the editing of speech.
.
Now that we have established that so that is on the way to becoming so five
minutes ago, what about that vogue use of so - exemplified at the top of
today's harangue - as an intensifier?
.
So beautiful is more beautiful than very beautiful. Yet when so is used as a
modifier of adjectives, it often comes across as gushy. When modifying strong
words, be careful of the appearance of excess. When you're sorry, you're sorry;
you don't have to pile on with "dreadfully sorry" or "so sorry." Enough
already. (To put a comma between enough and already is so 20th century.)
.
excerpted from The New York Times
http://www.iht.com/articles/531065.html
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