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‘War News Radio’

November 21, 2005, 8:24 am

Swarthmore College students are producing a weekly radio broadcast intended to broaden understanding of the war in Iraq and its impact on Americans and Iraqis. Called "War News Radio," the show features in-depth interviews with soldiers, Iraqi expatriates, and others, along with news from Iraq. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

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20 Responses to ‘War News Radio’

dw - December 19, 2011 at 9:07 pm

But the usage is hardly novel. It appears in Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translates the opening word, “Hwaet” as “so”),

“Appearing in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf” is hardly the same thing as “Appearing in Beowulf”!

That aside, this post is the kind of thing rightly categorized by Language Log as “prescriptivist poppycock”.

Bittybis - December 19, 2011 at 9:50 pm

I think it is used primarily to avoid the appearance of commanding authority in our current authority-phobic culture. It is shorthand for “I am now going to present a fact or situation established by others and for which I bear no responsibility.”

mbelvadi - December 20, 2011 at 7:52 am

I too first noticed the initial “so” being used by scientists, on CBC’s equivalent to Science Friday, called Quirks and Quarks. For a long while, I thought that the radio show producers were editing out for time something (eg paraphrasing the question) that the speaker had said before the “so”!

cleverclogs - December 20, 2011 at 7:57 am

I think the intent on NPR is to somehow imply “I get you. We’re on the same page.” Whenever I hear it, my assumption is that the interviewee is trying to show that s/he is so well-versed in the topic that not only did s/he anticipate this question, but s/he can almost complete the interviewer’s thought. Hence the “so” – as if the two are in the middle of one shared thought. So (!) the interview is less like a conversation and more like a vaudeville routine.

dank48 - December 20, 2011 at 9:38 am

Personally, I find the conclusive/assertive “so” more irritating than “So” as an introduction. There’s nothing particularly new about it; for me the definitive example can be heard on Woodstock, as Joan Baez says (more or less), “This song is for my husband David, who’s serving two years in the federal penitentiary for draft evasion, so, uh . . .” The implication seems to be that one’s moral superiority is so self-evident that it’s simply not necessary to continue. Even at the time, this struck me as too easy.

To Ms. Baez’s credit, she seems to have grown up at least as much as the rest of us in the past forty-plus years; some of us have merely gotten older.

12049089 - December 20, 2011 at 10:36 am

Here in northern Wisconsin, “And so.” is a complete response. As in:
Person #1: “I got my hairs cut today.”
Person #2: “And so!”

nordicexpat - December 20, 2011 at 10:52 am

Well, I guess out of politeness I should welcome you, but I really hope this is not indicative of the type of posts you’re going to write.

Rather than just make up things about what “so” as a discourse marker means, you could actually do some research on the topic (I know it is a blog, but I expect more from first-year students) Here’s a place to start:

http://www.gloriacappelli.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/so.pdf

MarjoryMunson - December 20, 2011 at 11:11 am

It’s good that so has only two letters and thus cannot be drawn out as is wha-a-a-t ev-er-r-r-r!

haroldfs - December 20, 2011 at 12:11 pm

I don’t see “so” as a sentence opener as a new thing–I think it’s been around a long time. To me
beginning a sentence with “so” or even just saying “so” is short for “So what?” I’ve heard that
as a sort of defiant answer to things other people claim since I was a kid.

greeneyeshade - December 20, 2011 at 1:18 pm

“Just so” is another idiomatic expression used in different ways. One is wanting things to be perfectly arranged: just so. Another is used as shorthand at the end of an analogy. In this latter situation, the analagous situation is compared to the one being described. Just so.

isugeezer - December 20, 2011 at 1:34 pm

“So” has also become annoyingly ubiquitous as a replacement for “very.” ["I love you so much." "You are so right."] Gack.

beedhamm - December 20, 2011 at 2:29 pm

You say, “You are very right”?

11223435 - December 20, 2011 at 4:22 pm

So?

jffoster - December 21, 2011 at 5:46 pm

Soooooo……,

MarjoryMunson - December 22, 2011 at 6:34 am

True – but say the two and the wha-a-a-t ev-er-r-r-r is more irritating in its sound.

big_giant_head - December 22, 2011 at 11:11 am

Hm. I admit that I only read the abstract, but that article does not appear to really address the particular uses of “so” that this author is–rightly–annoyed by.

juliasweig - January 3, 2012 at 11:07 am

I have noticed the use of So,… at the beginning of a response to a question as a barely veiled way of displaying the speaker’s contempt for the question itself and low regard for the knowledge base of the person doing the asking. As if to say, ‘So, do I really have to explain what should be patently obvious,’ or “So, here’s how you should have phrased that question and why I am the only person who really knows what they’re talking about…”

Jamie Raskin - January 3, 2012 at 3:53 pm

I am happy that Professor Mifflin has taken on the insufferably smug use of the word “so” at the start of sentences to signal that the speaker not only anticipated your point but has already long since refuted it and will now, laboriously, reconstruct his or her bullet-proof reasoning while you wait. I hear the word “so,” when used in this way, as a proxy for “well, you may not have heard yet, but our line on that is obviously . . .” This affectation is so replete in academic discourse I am afraid I don’t even hear it any more. Thanks for lifting our discourse a little above the so-so.

fromheretothere - January 4, 2012 at 9:36 pm

Love the post topic…but more so the word gems that made me smile for the rest of the day:

“…probably not aware that his comment was anti-semantic.”

“…stranding you on the far side of an ellipsis.”

(And just what category does the above usage of “so” fall into?)

lazybones - February 7, 2012 at 3:18 pm

Interesting reference. However, it deals solely with the use of an initial “So” to launch an incipient topic (one that both parties understand has been postponed, or was on the agenda). This is not at all the use described in this blog post, which appears to involve an almost meaningless verbal tic rather than a functional discourse marker.