So: The Thing Is ...
A note on reading between the lines of idioms
Diary of the Late Republic, #17
I’ve long been fascinated by the way language does and doesn’t change. Any literate person can read and understand prose from 50 years ago. A hundred years ago, too. Once you get to 200, the going starts to get tough. By the time you’re talking Shakespeare, it’s almost unreadable for the neophyte student, though you can begin to develop some rhythm with a little effort. Middle English? Fuhgettaboutit.
“Fuhgettaboutit”: that’s a neologism coined by Tom Wolfe in his great 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. (Wolfe loved that shit.) It means, “Don’t even go there,” which is itself a kind of slang for, “That’s not worth your time.” “Fuhgettaboutit” has a strong class accent: it’s meant to convey a proletarian’s lack of good diction and pronunciation, but in an affectionate way (and one that a member of the elite might invoke to indicate class solidarity). Unlike the British, for whom an accent or diction has long been accepted as an instant classification device, Americans, who pride themselves on their egalitarianism, have tended to downplay the way syntax is destiny. But that doesn’t change the reality. Ya know what I’m sayin’?
As far as I can tell, “fuhgettaboutit” is fading from our collective lexicon, perhaps because its faint proletarian European tinge is becoming less distinctive in a time when race is a more meaningful marker than varieties of such ethnicity that are now getting lumped together as “white” (just as varieties of Protestantism, which once were so important in sorting people, get generally tagged as “Christian”). Our vernacular today is pepped with “bros” and “cholos” rather than “hunkies” or “wops.” You dig?
What got me on this line of thinking is the Ezra Klein podcast. The generally twice-weekly show is part of my regular media diet. (It’s not exactly comfort food and sometimes causes mild indigestion, but it’s generally good for you, even if the podcast is sometimes a little too progressive for my taste). Klein is a very smart guy who crafts exquisite questions for very smart guests, who in turn dispense expertise with a gourmand’s light touch.
Here's what I’ve become fixated on: The way he and his guests use the word “so.” It is, of course, a staple word in our language with two very sturdy meanings. The first is as a modifier of emphasis: “This curry is so great I could eat it all night”; or “I was so exhausted I couldn’t get off the couch.” The second is to indicate a causal connection: “I was really hungry so I went out for curry.”
But when Klein and his peers use it, “so” functions as a low-key indicator to pay attention: what follows is going to reflect some distilled wisdom. Sometimes there’s a slight pause between the “so” to what comes next, or an elongation—“sooo”—that functions as an aural cue to perk up. Strictly speaking, such a “so” serves no grammatical purpose. But it lends an informal air that takes the edge off the wonkiness. Here’s his guest Jerusalem Demsas on April 30 in an episode titled “Cows Are Just an Environmental Disaster” (note the way the “just” also is kind of a hedge against the heterodoxy against common sense):
So local governments are fundamentally responsible for how land is used in this country … And so the problem I have is that we see repeatedly that very few people actually vote for local government.
Here's another typical use of the term in his episode with technologist Dario Amodei earlier last month talking about the pace of innovation in artificial intelligence:
So I think this is an example of a phenomenon that we may have seen a few times before in history, which is that there’s an underlying process that is smooth, and in this case, exponential.
So: They do this all the time. (Just yesterday morning I heard a sociologist on the Michael Smerconish podcast do it.) But here’s the thing— a phrase that means “everything you’ve just heard may make perfect sense, but I’m about to complicate it”: “So” has become a tic for elite figures to communicate their just-folks credentials along with their expertise—and to flatter their elite audiences into doing the same.
I don’t want to make too much of this. You might say I have already. After all, I teach in Greenwich, Connecticut, and constantly refer to my students as “folks,” which is both risible and useful (for one thing, it avoids all the gender complications attendant on an old-fashioned, but closer-to-accurate, “ladies and gentlemen”). Whatever. The underlying dynamics—the truth—of language is often in the idioms. Which rise and fall like sandcastles on the beach of time.
Whatever...