Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction "so" to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with "so." While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with "so," he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so's to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees. In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of...