So

[Flanders]

Allow me to begin the New Year with a trivial topic. May worldly events be as trivial throughout the coming year.

I’m devastated! I never realized that one of my oft-used words annoyed so many people:

So

"Tune in to any news channel and you'll hear it. The word serves no purpose in the sentence and to me is like fingernails on a chalkboard. So, I submit the extra, meaningless, and overused word 'so,'" wrote Scott Shackleton, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

December 31, 2015
The 16 most overused words of the year
By Rick Moran

Blog: The 16 most overused words of the year​

I had not written more than a few letters and postcards in 60 or so years. After I got my first computer in 2000, I did not take a refresher course in writing. My writing format came from memory. It was like learning how to ride a bicycle —— one just does it forever after.

To me, the way I use the word SO is preceded by a semicolon. I recall from my youth that the semicolon was a weak period at the end of a complete sentence followed by a complete sentence:

The Semicolon

The semicolon (; ) has only one major use. It is used to join two complete sentences into a single written sentence when all of the following conditions are met:

(1) The two sentences are felt to be too closely related to be separated by a full stop;
(2) There is no connecting word which would require a comma, such as and or but;
(3) The special conditions requiring a colon are absent.​

Here is a famous example:

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.​

A semicolon can always, in principle, be replaced either by a full stop (yielding two separate sentences) or by the word and (possibly preceded by a joining comma). Thus Dickens might have written:

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. or
It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.​

The use of the semicolon suggests that the writer sees the two smaller sentences as being more closely related than the average two consecutive sentences; preferring the semicolon to and often gives a more vivid sense of the relation between the two. But observe carefully: the semicolon must be both preceded by a complete sentence and followed by a complete sentence. Do not use the semicolon otherwise:

*I don't like him; not at all.
*In 1991 the music world was shaken by a tragic event; the death of Freddy Mercury.
*We've had streams of books on chaos theory; no fewer than twelve since 1988.
*After a long and bitter struggle; Derrida was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University.​

These are all wrong, since the semicolon does not separate complete sentences. (The first and last of these should have only a bracketing comma, while the second and third meet the requirements for a colon and should have one.) Here are some further examples of correct use:

Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937; the first volume of The Lord of the Rings followed in 1954.
The Cabernet Sauvignon grape predominates in the Bordeaux region; Pinot Noir holds sway in Burgundy; Syrah is largely confined to the Rhone valley.
Women's conversation is cooperative; men's is competitive.​

If a suitable connecting word is used, then a joining comma is required, rather than a semicolon:

Women's conversation is cooperative, while men's is competitive.​

A semicolon would be impossible in the last example, since the sequence after the comma is not a complete sentence.

Note, however, that certain connecting words do require a preceding semicolon. Chief among these are however, therefore, hence , thus, consequently, nevertheless and meanwhile:

Saturn was long thought to be the only ringed planet; however, this is now known not to be the case.
The two warring sides have refused to withdraw from the airport; consequently aid flights have had to be suspended.​

Observe that in these examples the sequence after the semicolon does constitute a complete sentence. And note particularly that the word however must be separated by a semicolon (or a full stop) from a preceding complete sentence; this is a very common mistake.

There is one special circumstance in which a semicolon may be used to separate sequences which are not complete sentences. This occurs when a sentence has become so long and so full of commas that the reader can hardly be expected to follow it without some special marking. In this case, we sometimes find semicolons used instead of commas to mark the most important breaks in the sentence: such semicolons are effectively being used to mark places where the reader can pause to catch his breath. Consider the following example:

In Somalia, where the civil war still rages, western aid workers, in spite of frantic efforts, are unable to operate, and the people, starving, terrified and desperate, are flooding into neighbouring Ethiopia.​

This sentence is perfectly punctuated, but the number of commas is somewhat alarming. In such a case, the comma marking the major break in the sentence may be replaced by a semicolon:

In Somalia, where the civil war still rages, western aid workers, in spite of frantic efforts, are unable to operate; and the people, starving, terrified and desperate, are flooding into neighbouring Ethiopia.​

Such use of the semicolon as a kind of "super-comma" is not very appealing, and you should do your best to avoid it. If you find one of your sentences becoming dangerously long and full of commas, it is usually better to start over and rewrite it, perhaps as two separate sentences:

In Somalia, where the civil war still rages, western aid workers, in spite of frantic efforts, are unable to operate. Meanwhile the people, starving, terrified and desperate, are flooding into neighbouring Ethiopia.​

In any case, don't get into the habit of using a semicolon (or anything else) merely to mark a breathing space. Your reader will be perfectly capable of doing his own breathing, providing your sentence is well punctuated; punctuation is an aid to understanding, not to respiration.

The Semicolon : The Colon and the Semicolon
​

In any event, I write to please myself. I think I write my messages in language the people I knew always used. I make my own rules if I think they make my thoughts clear to the folks who read my messages. Here’s an example of a Flanders’ rule:

I always follow a colon with an upper case letter. I always follow a semicolon with a lower case letter unless the word is a proper noun.

As you can see, I did not waste my misspent youth with English professors.

Finally, the word whom would probably top my list of annoying words. I never knew anybody that used it. Professional writers must use it if they want to remain in the good graces of the paymaster. I do not. That is another reason I never use it.

Here is a warmup for pedants who want to be a pain in the ass about the whole thing:

Usage Note: The traditional rules that determine the use of who and whom are relatively simple: who is used for a grammatical subject, where a nominative pronoun such as I or he would be appropriate, and whom is used elsewhere. Thus, we write The actor who played Hamlet was there, since who stands for the subject of played Hamlet; and Who do you think is the best candidate? where who stands for the subject of is the best candidate. But we write To whom did you give the letter? since whom is the object of the preposition to; and The man whom the papers criticized did not show up, since whom is the object of the verb criticized. Considerable effort and attention are required to apply the rules correctly in complicated sentences. To produce correctly a sentence such as I met the man whom the government had tried to get France to extradite, we must anticipate when we write whom that it will function as the object of the verb extradite, several clauses distant from it. It is thus not surprising that writers from Shakespeare onward should often have interchanged who and whom. And though the distinction shows no signs of disappearing in formal style, strict adherence to the rules in informal discourse might be taken as evidence that the speaker or writer is paying undue attention to the form of what is said, possibly at the expense of its substance. In speech and informal writing who tends to predominate over whom; a sentence such as Who did John say he was going to support? will be regarded as quite natural, if strictly incorrect. By contrast, the use of whom where who would be required, as in Whom shall I say is calling? may be thought to betray a certain linguistic insecurity. When the relative pronoun stands for the object of a preposition that ends a sentence, whom is technically the correct form: the strict grammarian will insist on Whom (not who) did you give it to? But grammarians since Noah Webster have argued that the excessive formality of whom in these cases is at odds with the relative informality associated with the practice of placing the preposition in final position and that the use of who in these cases should be regarded as entirely acceptable. The relative pronoun who may be used in restrictive relative clauses, in which case it is not preceded by a comma, or in nonrestrictive clauses, in which case a comma is required. Thus, we may say either The scientist who discovers a cure for cancer will be immortalized, where the clause who discovers a cure for cancer indicates which scientist will be immortalized, or The mathematician over there, who solved the four-color theorem, is widely known, where the clause who solved the four-color theorem adds information about a person already identified by the phrase the mathematician over there. Some grammarians have argued that only who and not that should be used to introduce a restrictive relative clause that identifies a person. This restriction has no basis either in logic or in the usage of the best writers; it is entirely acceptable to write either the man that wanted to talk to you or the man who wanted to talk to you. The grammatical rules governing the use of who and whom apply equally to whoever and whomever. See Usage Note at else, that, whose.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language​