We recently had a post about starting stories with the word so. Heres Seamus Heaney on starting his translation of Beowulf with so: Conventional renderings of hwaet, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with lo and hark and behold and attend and--more colloquially--listen being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle so came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom so operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, so it was: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes campaigns.
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 17:05:25 +0000