A Word, Please: This use of ‘so’ was so confusing
“Erin Burnett was in tears. So will you.” This headline and subhead appeared on the CNN homepage, for a while. A few hours later, the wording had been changed, replaced by “An interview left Erin Burnett in tears. You will cry, too.”
Someone figured out that something was wrong with “So will you.” But to understand where that wording failed, we need to put under the microscope a word we use every day but probably never think about: so.
Like a lot of words, “so” qualifies as several different parts of speech, including adverb, conjunction and adjective. Some of its common uses are controversial among sticklers. More on those in a minute. But for now, we need to figure out what job it’s doing in this sentence.
My best analysis was that “so” was standing in for a verb. Look at “He will quit and so will she.” In the first clause, you have a subject, “he,” followed by a modal auxiliary verb, “will,” followed by another verb that works with the modal to complete the verb phrase, “quit.”
I figured “so” was working kind of like a pronoun, standing in for the verb “quit.” But pronouns only stand in for nouns, not verbs. Therefore, in my analysis, “so” would have to be a verb.
The dictionary doesn’t list it as a verb, however. Meaning something’s wrong with either the dictionary itself or my analysis. You can probably guess which one fell short.
I reached out to Merriam-Webster dictionary editor and lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, who made sense of things for me. The “so” in “He will quit and so will she” can be understood not as a verb but as an adverb meaning “too” or “also.”
In other words, “So will she” means “She will too.” That, unlike my verb guess, lines up with the dictionary. “‘So,’ adv: In the same manner or way; also.” Merriam’s example, “worked hard and so did she.”
So “so” isn’t completing the verb. It’s saying “also” while leaving the verb phrase incomplete, truncating it after the auxiliary “will.” That makes sense. After all, we truncate verb phrases by cutting them off after auxiliary verbs all the time.
“Are you on the schedule tomorrow?” “I am.”
“Will you clock in on time?” “I will.”
“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” “I do.”
See how the second sentence in each leaves part of the verb implied? Nothing wrong with that. As long as the stuff left out on the assumption it’s already clear to the reader is, in fact, clear to the reader.
That’s where our CNN subhead went wrong. When you say “I will” after someone asks, “Will you clock in on time?” It’s clear how your sentence would be finished. “I will (clock in on time).”
But when you say, “You will” after saying “Erin Burnett was in tears,” the truncated form equates to “You will in tears.” Something’s missing: the rest of the verb phrase.
For example, “be”: “You will be in tears” works fine, as does a truncated version of that, “You will be.” You can even add the word “so” to mean “too” or “also”: Also, you will be in tears. You, too, will be in tears. So will you be. So will you be in tears.
All of those work, but only if you finish the verb by adding “be.”
Now for those controversial uses I mentioned. Some folks say you can’t use “so” at the beginning of a sentence. That’s not true. Others say “so” is overused as a connective, so this sentence would grate on them. That’s a matter of taste. Others say that “so” can’t be used as a shortened form of “so that.” That’s just not true.
All the fussing over normal-seeming uses of “so” is just that. Fussing. The only time you need to worry about “so” is in cases like our CNN headline, where something clearly seems off. In those cases, it probably is.
