the tindog coffeehouse

Sheer. Genius.

Be on the lookout for members of the Squirrel Liberation Front disguised as common household items!

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Previously:
All hail the solar-powered squirrel god
Squirrel Uprising: The latest updates
Squirrel Uprising: Rise of the black ‘super squirrel’

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My 12th-grade English teacher would kill me if she read this blog. As is the case throughout most of the blogosphere, the style of writing here is extremely informal. So if you’ve read any of my posts, you’ve probably noticed I often start sentences with the word “so”, a common practice in conversational English but technically incorrect since it’s used as a conjunction.

So who should we denounce for this scandalous practice? According to the New York Times, it’s all Silicon Valley’s fault:

So it is widely believed that the recent ascendancy of “so” began in Silicon Valley. The journalist Michael Lewis picked it up when researching his 1999 book “The New New Thing”: “When a computer programmer answers a question,” he wrote, “he often begins with the word ‘so.’ ” Microsoft employees have long argued that the “so” boom began with them.

In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of possible transitions with a catchall. And “so” suggested a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving software types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process — if this, then that.

This logical tinge to “so” has followed it out of software. Compared to “well” and “um,” starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Whereas “well” vacillates, “so” declaims.

So even though I’m violating at least ten grammatical laws by beginning my sentences with “so”, I can rightfully blame my technical background for the habitual mistake. That may not appease my 12th-grade English teacher, but at least I know I’m in good company.

So there.

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Hmm… Kinda looks like me, I suppose. I feel like I need to go jump over some turtle shells and rescue a princess.

Make your own 8-bit self here.

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(You knew this was inevitable, right? Now… how do we make him go away?)

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