So . . .

How did this become a thing?

Random Respected Interviewer: “Could you tell us how Mayor XXX started his successful initiative to clean up downtown XXX?”

Expert/Writer/Politician/Pundit: “So . . . in the late 90’s, the downtown had succumbed to urban blight and . . .”

or

Child: “Mommy? How are babies made?”

Mother: “So . . . a man and a woman get their freak on and . . .”

or

Start-up Dweeb: “So . . .  really glad to be here at the conference, hoping to make an impact on the whole so . . . cioeconomic bag and shake it up some. So, I would like to introduce the co-founder and this week’s CEO, would, like, was formerly a bike messenger but who is, like, now controlling the dispersal of $42 million of angel venture capitalist funding, so, no, wait, what? I mean capital funding, not capitalist, heh heh.”

So . . . how the hell did ‘so’ become the ‘well . . .’ of this current generation of self-serving ideo-phants? How did this become an acceptable part of speech?

So . . . if you’re guessing that it’s annoying, you’ve guessed so, so right. So, what is ‘so’, rather than just, according to either Mr. Rodgers or Mr. Hammerstein, “a needle pulling thread”? Well, according to any respectable dictionary, it’s either an adverb, as in, “She smells SO bad. Amiright?” or a conjunction, as in “I ran out of heroin, SO I had to track down my dealer, toute suite.” As a conjunction, it means ‘therefore’ or ‘for this reason.’ If, then. See? “The dog has memmeroids SO he’s dragging his butt on the newly-shampooed rug. That’s SO disgusting. Amiright?”

So, starting a statement with ‘So . . . ‘ with no antecedant just makes no sense. Oh, did I miss the beginning of the conversation? What came before ‘so’? Is there something that’s assumed to have been said that was instead transmitted telepathically and I, for whatever reason, am out of that privileged loop, so, I didn’t get the message?

So, please stop using so in the beginning of a statement because it makes no gosh-darned sense.

Amiright?