So dado
Sunday musical excursion #52
A dado is nowadays a somewhat outdated interior decoration technique, involving a horizontal line of beading long a wall, below which you often find panelling, or wainscotting, and above which the wall is papered or painted.
Image: the component parts of a dado.1
Back in the 1940s, my mother worked for a painters and decorators in Glasgow and once regaled us with the story of how she entered the office of Mr Chisholm, her boss, to find him on the telephone, making a gesture in the air as if to mark a certain height, whilst speaking into the receiver: “You want a dado? What? Up to about here?”
Well, you may laugh at Mr Chisholm’s foresight, at imagining the wonders of face-to-face telecommunications back in 1949 but, even on Facetime, “here” is not exactly a precise measurement. So. Why do people say so? Or, rather, why do people say so?
The rendition of the sol-fa by Rodgers and Hammerstein in the musical The Sound of Music, may perhaps have taught the von Trapp children about musical notation, but it didn’t do much for their spelling skills. Doe is a deer, a female deer, ray is a drop of golden sun (and, in German, Reh is in fact that deer), me is the name I call myself, far is a long, long way to run, sew is a needle pulling thread, la! is actually a Shakespearean exclamation of “Gosh!”, and tea is a drink with bread and jam (not jam and bread).
So, Do-re-mi being so so-so in terms of aural recognition, so is not a needle pulling thread. But, as you can divine, it is a measure of something, just like here indicates the height of a dado.
Use of the word so as an expression of measure needs a reference to that of which it is the measure: I was so tired that I needed to sit down for a minute. Clearly, there is a state of tiredness before that at which one needs to sit down for a minute is reached, and beyond which one reaches the state of tiredness necessitating sitting down for two minutes. So tired is the one-minute recovery time point. That is how so is used: it means to the point at which. So, so used so ubiquitously that it lacks any point of reference just becomes a filler word. As in the conversational techniques of two south-German Schwaben:2
So, so.
Ja, ja.
So, so.
Ja.
So.
Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja.
Ach, so.
Halt’ die Klappe!
What we hear these days are two completely unrelated uses of so. Thank you so much should invite the query Really? How much is that? What is meant is apparently very. Very is very much substituted by so, so much that very is becoming so very rare, it’s hardly encountered at all.
What always somewhat discombobulates me is when people begin a speech with the word “So.” No qualifying reference, no height measurement, no Swabian conversation, nothing. Just so. Just so speeches, you might say (if Rudyard Kipling were around). So does function as a conjunction, equivalent to therefore. Now imagine you’re sitting there in the House of Commons and the prime minister stands up at the dispatch box and starts speaking: Therefore. Surely, the Speaker (that’s the Speaker of the House of Commons, not the prime minister, who is the one speaking, but not speaking properly in this case) should intervene: “Prime Minister: Therefore? For what, prithee, there, Prime Minister?”
Once, when I was 15 or so, I was at a school cricket match against Askwith College at their grounds in Harrogate, and their coach gave their team a pep talk that I have never forgotten. He said, “Play the ball forthright. Forthright, whether you stop it or hit it for six. Play forthright.” Not aggressive, not arrogant, not hesitatingly, not defensively, but forthright. It is a word I still use myself. So is not forthright, it is now, where was I?, when in fact you weren’t anywhere.
My brother once did an exchange organised through the Anglo-Austrian Society. He went to Vienna for a couple of weeks to stay with the family of an Austrian boy (he and the other lad were about 14 years of age), and then he returned with the Viennese boy, who stayed with us for a few weeks. The two of them did not get on well together. It was, I suppose, a classic misunderstanding. My brother had listed his interests as including music and, er, music is a broad church indeed. His own tastes lay in the field of The Who, The Moody Blues, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and that sort of genre. Whereas—the clue really was in the location of Vienna—the counterparty’s interests lay more in the area of Mozart, Strauss and the like.
He played our upright Joanna very well. My parents were not so very well travelled, and most of their travels had been made through the medium of the cinema, so of course they tried to engage the Austrian boy’s interest through The Sound of Music, which had been filmed in and around Salzburg. He, of course, knew the film? The of course turned out to be presumptuous in the extreme. Not only did he not know the film, he didn’t even know of the film. Never heard of it? That greatest eye-opener of all time for American and British audiences to the culture of Austria?
Only later would we learn that, not only does The Sound of Music have little enough to do with the von Trapp family, but it was widely derided in Austria for reflecting anything but Austrian culture. It was letztendlich made by Hollywood, for Hollywood appetites. It just happened to have been filmed on location in Austria. That was all that could be said about its links to the country. If Marshmallow Mateys are ultra-processed food, then The Sound of Music is ultra-processed culture: all its wholesomeness has been processed out of it until it’s left with a sugar-coated sickly sweet taste, that afterwards nonetheless leaves you craving for more. A bit like with cocaine.
Let us return, then, to central Europe, to the song we all loved to hate, and never could spell. In the linked reprise of the song Do-re-mi, which follows on from the mountain meadow scene in which Maria has demonstrated how notes can be strung together to make a song using the names she has given to them (do is actually wrong, it should be ut, but never mind), one of the children comes out with the immortal line, “But it doesn’t mean anything.” Well, I’d have chided her and sent her to her room without any tea, with or without jam and bread, because the first iteration of the blasted song up on that meadow was all about trying to put meanings to the notes: do is a deer, my dear (a female deer; oh, dear!) Anyhow, Maria now gives the notes other words to explain them (you can sing ’most anything (perhaps almost is more correct)). That’s it. That’s the explanation. And, all of a sudden we’re on our bicycles.
Enjoy, and thank you so much.
Do-re-mi
Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II
Performed by Julie Andrews, Charmian Carr, Nicholas Hammond, Heather Menzies, Duane Chase, Angela Cartwright, Debbie Turner and Kym Karath
From the 1965 album The Sound of Music Soundtrack
By Egmason - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10868159.
The Schwabenland is the area of Stuttgart and southwards to the Schwäbische Alb, which runs diagonally from Schaffhausen in Switzerland to Ulm on the Bavarian border. I used to live there and have heard this conversation many times. Even participated, because it is an excellent exercise for beginners of German. Klappe = cake-hole.