Animas Weblog

I really want to read this post by Bill Slawski about singals. But I got stuck at the beginning when I saw this:

I noticed for instance, that it was pretty common, at the recent SES in San Jose, for search engineers, giving presentations, or in conversations tend to start many sentences with the word “So,” as in:

“So, if you think about…”

“So, if we were to….”

“So, you have this…”

I guess that’s part of the cost of presenting hypothetical situations and theories to others.

I hate to say it, but this drove me nuts when I first noticed it a few years ago. It seems to have started in the Bay Area and rippled out from there. On my most recent trip, I noticed that every other sentence ended with the word “right”. Not always in a rhetorical fashion as in “2 + 2 equals 4, right?” Sometimes it was very unclear whether the person ending their sentence with “right” was actually looking for affirmation from the listener, or just pointing out that they thought what they said was patently obvious. And so it was unclear whether the speaker thought that I, as a listener, was stupid or not. Knowing me, they probably did think I was stupid.

Anyhow, if you’re scraping and repurposing Bay Area content, or just trying to understand what people are saying, try using this regular expression to get to the core meaning. I’m not a regexp wizard, but it should do the trick when matching Bay Area sentences.

^So,(.*)right[\.\?]$

So, the possibilities are endless given this starting point, right?