Sun, Jul 25, 2004 page9

• A movie about the word `so' would be called `The Intensifier'

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  I stole that from Christian Tot's review of a rock concert in The Washington Times: "Times change, and today's listeners wanna hear Jet, the Strokes and other, oh, so 2004 music."

  The hot adverb, used there to emphasize timeliness, is more often used to signify the out-of-date. On Fox TV, Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host, said of the talk about Bill Clinton's autobiography, "The Monica Lewinsky stuff now really seems so last century."

  The popularization of this usage may have begun with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1992, when Buffy pointed to a new jacket and was told: "Please! That's so five minutes ago."

  Six years later, the media critic Howard Kurtz picked up on that and wrote in The Washington Post: "The media went wild over the tapes -- Monica and Linda talking about hairstyles ... Iraq was, like, so five minutes ago."

  Last year, commenting on "the dreary corporate governance craze," Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times wrote, "Failures at Enron and WorldCom are so five minutes ago."

  Recently, commenting on the award by a Scottish heraldic society of a coat of arms to Colin Powell, Time wrote, "Medals are so last month." The vogue use of so is not limited to time. Mena Suvari, described by Newsweek as "the thinking man's sex kitten," took a call at a hair salon and said to her interviewer: "I'm working this call in between my color and toner. That is so bad. I'm so Hollywood."

  So we will now take a hard look at so. Though it is used as a conjunction to mean "consequently" ("I was given this ticket, so I went"), the short, ancient word also has a dozen meanings as a modifier. These range from "in a specified way" ("Hold the golf club so") to "in the extent expressed" ("I'm so tired of Valley talk"), from its kindred "also" ("So do I") to "true" ("Say it ain't so, Joe").

  But this quicksilver so gives stylists fits. The preceding paragraph should begin with "therefore" or "thus;" so in that sense is considered overly informal to the point of sloppiness. When you mean "accordingly," a fuzzy word like so doesn't do the semantic trick. So there. You can use "So there," meaning "Take that!" or "Didn't I tell you?" because it's an idiom, and idioms trump all rules.

  Stylists also hold that so must be followed by that when introducing clauses of result or purpose. Native speakers argue that we are still zigging when the rest of the world has zagged.

  "I want to go home so I can get to bed." Should a that follow the purposeful so? In speech, no; in writing, yes. In the most formal writing, use "so that" so that you can show you know how to behave with conjunctions in classy, literate company. But when you're talking and don't need to wear a tie -- lose the that. In a generation or so, the writing will follow the editing of speech. Now that we have established that so that is on the way to becoming so five minutes ago, what about that vogue use of so -- exemplified at the top of today's harangue -- as an intensifier?

  So beautiful is more beautiful than very beautiful. Yet when so is used as a modifier of adjectives, it often comes across as gushy. When modifying strong words, be careful of the appearance of excess. When you're sorry, you're sorry; you don't have to pile on with "dreadfully sorry" or "so sorry." Enough already. To put a comma between enough and already is so 20th century.

  A final, reduplicated usage: In the accounts after former US president Ronald Reagan's death of his spontaneous humor, this anecdote was featured. Asked how a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu had gone, Reagan replied, "So-so."

  Class war warfare

  In conventionspeak, watch for class warfare. "Here in Washington," President George W. Bush said earlier this month, "there tends to be class warfare. It says only certain people get tax relief."

  A week later, he returned to the theme and the phrase: "Angry talk and class warfare rhetoric and economic isolationism won't get anybody hired." A Kerry campaign spokesman, David Wade, responded by resuscitating a clever anti-elitist gag used against the first president Bush: "This guy who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple is going to engage in a sad game of class warfare?"

  However, the Democratic running mates freely use class and struggle in the same sentence. John Kerry praised John Edwards as a champion of "those struggling to reach the middle class," while Edwards hailed Kerry's concern for "those in the middle class who struggle every day." Class warfare began as class struggle. In their 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" -- in German, Klassenkaempfen. Kampf is translated as "struggle," short of Krieg, "war." But in 1852, the battle was rhetorically escalated in The Times of London: "Lord Henry Lennox thinks that the pressure of taxation is unequal, and he hopes for an amicable settlement of our fatal class warfare." Sounds as if Lord Henry is running for office today. Aldous Huxley in 1927 denounced "those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of class warfare."

  If the struggle is not embraced and class war is not excoriated in the month before the election, that will be an October surprise, coined in 1968, I recall from firsthand experience, by William Casey, who went on to become the director of central intelligence.
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