So in style at the NYT
New York Times editorial, "The
Amnesty Trap", 4/5/06, p. A22:
All it [the Martinez-Hagel compromise
bill on immigration] would do is give a face-saving assurance to
hard-liners that immigrants would suffer adequately for their green
cards and allow Republicans to reassure suspicious constituents: this
is so not amnesty.
Ah, GenX
so! How in
style is that?
GenX
so -- so-called because
it seems to have first appeared in the speech of Generation Xers (in
the 80s, with the movie
Heathers
as a major boost for its spread) -- is recognizable in speech by its
characteristic high-rising-falling intonation (which distinguishes it
from ordinary intensifying
so,
even when the intensifier is accented), but can be detected in writing
only through its syntactic context: clear cases of GenX
so occur in contexts that otherwise
are not available for intensifiers -- with dates and similar time
expressions ("That is, like,
so
1980s", "It was so two years ago"), proper nouns and pronouns ("This is
so Iceland", "It's so you"), absolute adjectives ("You are
so dead!"), negatives ("It's so not
entertaining", "A pizza delivery man who can't find a campus address is
so not my problem"), and VPs ("We
so
don't have a song", "Parker so wanted to be included", "I am so hitting
you with the September issue of
Vogue!").
There are cases -- like the title of this posting -- that aren't so
easy to classify, but the
Times
editorial's
so is a solid
example of a GenX use, with a negative.
The thing about GenX
so is
that, though it's spreading, it's still associated (almost twenty years
after
Heathers) in the minds
of many people with the trendy young, especially young women.
Meanwhile, plenty of older folks (like me) find it handy rather than
trendy, and use it every so often. Nevertheless, it's still an
informal usage, so it's a small surprise to see it in a
Times editorial, even in a
representation of speech.
But the
Times's editorial
style is not at all stiffly formal. The editorial writers seem to
be aiming at something you might call "relaxed formal"(or possibly
"serious informal"), the sort of thing you might expect in essays, on
serious subjects, that are meant for a general educated
readership. Part of the point is not to be off-putting, and
a friendly conversational tone can be helpful. So we get things
like article omission in the introductory expressions
the thing/
trouble/
point/
problem/...
is:
Most Americans -- two-thirds, accordng
to a Pew Research poll this month -- believe that Saddam Hussein had a
hand in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Trouble is, no hard
evidence of such a link has been made public. (NYT editorial "The Illusory Prague
Connection", 10/23/02, p. A26)
Apparently, GenX
so is now
entrenched enough to count as an everyday colloquialism, like Initial
Article Omission. You go,
so!
[Note on intensifier
so:
Astonishingly, some advice manuals -- like the recent
Garner's Modern American Usage --
label plain ol' intensifier
so
'very' ("I'm so happy to meet you!") as casual, colloquial, or
conversational, too informal in style for use in serious writing.
This one has been around since Old English. Though it is
certainly frequent in conversation (where it rivals, or in some counts,
exceeds,
very and
really), it is not at all rare in
serious nonfiction. Perhaps the reasoning of the advice writers
is that a usage that's very common in conversation is appropriate only
there. But that's fallacious reasoning; surely
yes and
no and clauses without dependent
clauses in them (and huge numbers of other usages) are much more
frequent in conversation than in serious nonfiction, but there's
absolutely no reason to avoid them in formal writing. What's
important is not the relative frequency of a usage in various contexts,
but the associations speakers make between the usage and those
contexts.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at April 6, 2006 05:02 PM