SO

Jerry Harkins

The longest entry in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [1] is the 161 pages devoted to the word set which has 430 meanings in print (with another two hundred and some waiting for the Third Edition).  Run is second with 396 meanings.  Sadly, both words are quite pedestrian and their treatment in the OED is not light reading.  Happily, though, there are enough interesting words in English to make reading it addictive.  Consider, for example, what may be the most interesting word in English:  so.  The OED covers it in only a little more than five pages, attributing to it some 40 meanings. [2] I would argue that such (relatively) parsimonious attention is insufficiently respectful.

My favorite dictionary for everyday use [3] invests only 631 words in so, 261 of them devoted to a mere sixteen definitions which barely scratch the surface of its usage.  Eight of these are adverbs, two are  adjectives, two conjunctions, two idioms and one each pronoun and interjection  The majority of the entry is given over to usage notes which, like the entire entry, are somewhat pedantic.  It, too, misses the richness, the mystery and the romance of the word, all of which are hinted at in the OED entry (as long as you are willing to spend a few days looking for the needles in a verbal haystack).

The etymology of so is simple even if nothing else about it is.  It derives from Old English, a blend of the languages spoken by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who settled in Britannia after the Roman legions left in 410 CE. [4] These Germanic people displaced the native Britons who spoke Latin and Brittonic, a Celtic language.  As time went on, swa which was the Old English word for so became swo and eventually swo became so.  As this evolution was occurring, its meaning was coalescing around a group of words signifying causation.  “It was raining so I took an umbrella.”  Thus. Therefore.  But so is not quite as resolute.  Therefore is definite.  B happened because and only because A had happened previously.  So leaves room for other factors.  It says A influenced B in this case, but B could be caused by contributing factors or even by factors in the absence of A.  The usual Latin word would be sic as in “Sic transit gloria mundi,” thus passes the glory of the world.  This is spoken during a papal coronation when flax is burned referring metaphorically to the ephemeral nature of worldly things.  If the smoke really caused the ephemerality, therefore (ergo) would have been used.

Many uses of so are similarly slightly vague or totally opaque.  Among the latter is the idiom So long which is a phrase meaning farewell with a hint of “I’ll see you soon.”  There is no shortage of theories for this you can find on the web but neither word signifies anything relevant.   Of course, goodbye is only slightly more meaningful.  Its supposed origin as a contraction of the phrase God be with ye seems like an academic conceit even though modern entomologists insist that good and god are unrelated.

Almost as devoid of meaning is so used, like ah or uh, as a kind of verbal tic or punctuation, a sound that can serve to introduce a new idea, direct attention to what follows or merely provide a brief pause for the speaker and listener to prepare for what follows.  It acts as a gateway and is often used when responding to a question.  A politician will answer a question by “So” followed by a full stop or pause and then an answer or, more likely, an evasion.  A transcript should indicate this with a period.  Closely related is a use which makes it less of a request and more of  a command or directive similar to the military injunction, “Now hear this.”  The more forceful the directive is, the more likely it should be followed by an exclamation point in a text or a rising inflection in the spoken word. 

The next gradation of so marks what follows as a matter of some wonder.  It is used like lo, behold or the repetitious phrase lo and behold.  Lo is a Middle English word for look and is used synonymously with behold.  [5]. A parent happens in on a teenage scene of which he or she does not approve and says “So!”  The degree of disapproval (or, occasionally, approval) depends entirely on the inflection.  However, the meaning of the inflection is never in doubt.

Doubt creeps in when we have lost the colloquial senses in which expressions were used.  The word cool, for example, has several contemporary connotations that have nothing to do with the temperature.  Among other things, it can mean laid back, popular, awesome, slow down or okay.  A future translator who knew these variations would have to choose one from the context while another who knew only the formal meaning would be puzzled by the idea of a cool cat.  We can turn to Seamus Heaney for a more literary example. [6]  The first line of Beowulf in Old English is:

Hwæt wê Gâr-Dena in gear-dagum

Given that we don’t have access to colloquial or idiomatic Old English, this means, "What we Spear-Danes, in [the] old days."   We are left to treat Hwæt as an adjective meaning what which makes no sense in context.  Clearly the Anglo-Saxons used it in a sense or senses that have been lost, leaving modern translators to imagine what what might also mean or imply.  Heaney renders it So followed by a period.  He gives the first and second lines as:

So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s prose translation of the same lines [7] gives Hwæt as "Lo!":

Lo! the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear Danes in days of old we have heard tell, how those princes did deeds of valour. 

This would read better had Tolkien put a period after old and begun a new sentence with We.  But, like James Joyce, his usage is often eccentric so, as it is, the passage reads more like Tolkien than like the author of Beowulf.

Other translators have used "Listen" for Hwæt.  "Lo" is similar and perhaps more poetic.  It means something close to "behold" as in the gospel account of the first Christmas ("And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them…" Luke 2:9 from the Latin Et ecce).  I can't think of any justification for Heaney’s so.  I can imagine a bard saying "So" in the sense of "So let's begin the story by saying…"  But if he had and if he was writing in Old English he probably would have used Swa. In fact, swa appears often in the standard text and is translated as so by Heaney and others.

In the foreword to his translation, Heaney says, “But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.”  The same can be said of Tolkien's Lo.  But it still leaves the question of what the original may have been implying by Hwæt.  Perhaps the author was a Christian monk working in the Sixth Century and maybe the word Hwæt was taken from the first line of a local prayer beginning “What God has wrought.”  Might Hwæt then have evolved to become a poet’s shorthand invocation of Bragi, the Norse God of Poetry, for help in telling his story?  It seems far-fetched but remember that all three of the great classical epics – The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid –  begin with a prayer of invocation to Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. [8] 

None of this is to dispute any of the decisions made by any of the translators whose work I have cited.  I can have my preferences but I cannot dispute Heaney's preference for So.  I can certainly appreciate the difficulties he faced and I have a strong impression that So is part of what gives his translation the feel of Old English in spite of its purported contemporary origin in "Hiberno-English Scullion-speak" which seems to refer to what my Irish grandparents would call "kitchen talk" implying the gossip of kitchen workers behind closed doors.  It sounds right to me even if Beowulf is hardly the kind of rhetoric one would expect of a medieval scullion. 

Another of the most common uses of so is thus as in the expression “So be it” which derives from and is the meaning of the word amen in Hebrew.  The OED says that in this usage, so is a “predicate” which is probably not precisely correct.  Be that as it may, the sentence usually expresses the hope that what preceded it (usually a prayer in the case of amen) will come to pass.  On the other hand, the same phrase can indicate resignation to something unhappy.  Change the sentence just a bit and it becomes, “Is that so?”  Then there is the traditional assertion of integrity, “I do so declare,” which is written and signed at the end of a test.  It is not a hope but almost an oath that the writer has not cheated.  The so is the object of the predicate do declare and refers to a set of community rules well known to all members.

So what?  How much is so much?  How little is not so much?  How poor is so-so?  How bad is a so-and-so?  How so is quite so?  We have come full circle.  Each of these sos means nothing or almost nothing aside from the speaker's inflection, how it is said.  The answer to all these questions is to some unspecified degree greater than zero and less than infinity.  So we reach the point of this essay:  virtually all words in all languages have multiple meanings which range from strictly logical to incomprehensible.  Words stray far and fast from their root meanings, leaving a crazy quilt matrix of their journey.  An attentive reader can see what in Hwæt but only a poet can see the so.

Notes

1.  Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 20 volumes, Clarendon Press, 1989.

2.  ibid. Volume XV, pp. 886-892.

3.  The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006, p. 1648.

4.  These and several other small Germanic tribes originally spoke different dialects of Frisian which linguists tell us were mutually unintelligible.  But in Brittan, they lived in close contact and had to communicate.

5.  The equivalent word in Latin is ecce as in Isaiah 7:14.   The Latin Vulgate says, “…ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitis nomen eius Emmanuhel.”  The ecce is almost always translated as behold.  Thus the famous line from Isaiah, “…behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emanuel.”  Or that from Lamentations, “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”  Again, we are confronted not with reality but with metaphor.  You cannot actually look at the virgin who will be conceiving or the sorrows of Jerusalem.

6.  Seamus Heaney, Beowulf:  A New Verse Translation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.  Heaney gives us the poem in the Anglo-Saxon with his translation on the facing page.  In an earlier essay on the art of translation, I have expressed the opinion that Heaney was the greatest contemporary translator of classical poetry.  Part of this discussion of the first line of Beowulf is taken from that essay.

7  J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, Christopher Tolkien, editor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

8.  Some have argued that these invocations were directed not to Calliope but to her mother Mnemosyne, the Titan of memory, for assistance in recalling the events of the poem.  But the Titans were relatively less contemporary and therefore less important to the Greeks than the Muses.  Homer is explicitly addressing a Muse.  If not Calliope, a case could be made for Clio, another of Mnemosyne's daughters and the Muse of history.