The remorseless rise of ‘so’

So, a question for you. Are you bothered by the fact that you hear the word so, quite so often? Does ‘so’ grate on you?

It grates on me. A lot. Every time I hear it I shudder, which makes certain television channels frankly hazardous.

In fact, I’ve reached my absolute ‘so’ saturation point. It happened the other morning when my son, who is just five, walked into the sitting room and announced portentously: ‘So, the question is…’

I didn’t catch the question because I was wracking my brain as to where he had come up with that form of words. And then it dawned on me…

Over the next half an hour I must have caught myself either saying ‘so’ or very nearly doing so, about half a dozen times.

It has rapidly become the verbal brain burp of the epoch, heralding the arrival of a new thought from a speaker. Indeed, its ubiquity is so supreme that I fear it will drive many perfectly better words to the point of extinction.