The initial "so"

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

> it's hard to search the archives for.

FWIW, I don't have a genuine problem with that syntactic structure -
IMO, it's a little funny in the ha-hah sense, but otherwise fully
grammatical - but I like

It's hard to search the archives for _it_

better.

It's a case of what a person is accustomed to hearing. I had no idea
that there was anything comical about, e.g. "chop suey" or "egg
fu-yong" till I happened to mention these Chinese dishes to the bruz
and cuz in Marshall, back in the day. The locals _fell out_ ("burst
into laughter," in this case), having a hard time believing that these
noises could be anything but jibber-jabber that I had made up on the
spot in order to be entertaining.

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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