Ah, So!

Greg Crosby amusingly discusses one of my pet peeves: this new fad of starting a sentence with the word "so", as if the speaker is already halfway through a story. It's very annoying, and Crosby captures it perfectly by giving some famous examples:  

"Daphne du Maurier, 'Rebecca': 'So last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again'.  And using 'so' to start famous speeches would really dumb down their impact. Can you see Abraham Lincoln standing solemnly at Gettysburg, looking out over the crowd and saying, 'So it was four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…' Think how FDR's address to Congress would have sounded if he had said, 'So yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan'"