[WWWWH]

I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention.

*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…

Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.

[rmunn]

On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world."

I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:

1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.

2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.

3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.

(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).

[stavros]

Unfortunately, cataloguing all the knowledge in the world created new knowledge, leading to a sort of Zeno's paradox of cataloguing.

[skybrian]

Which Greeks? What project is this?

[ubertaco]

I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..."

It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.

I remember one session in particular.

This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.

This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."

The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.

"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.

He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).

[andrewflnr]

> He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road"

Optimal play from the professor.

[vintermann]

Maybe good pedagogy, but the point is that's not what the Anglo-Saxons were doing. What they did (in Beowulf, and seemingly most of the time they started their sentences with hwæt) would be more like starting the lecture with: "How fun carbonyl chemistry is!"

[tdeck]

I'm confused, isn't this the exact usage that TFA is refuting?

> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.

[gjm11]

Same purpose, different grammatical structure.

Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)

This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".

I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.

Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.

[vanderZwan]

> SO let me tell you

all about how...

Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.

[CGMthrowaway]

That's great. Similar trick I've picked up is to say "blah blah blah ... is as follows:" followed by a pause and then your explanation, which is always more than the one or two words the listener might have otherwise been expecting. This technique allows you to keep the talking stick and express an idea that takes more than a few words, without someone jumping to an immediate conclusion or interrupting you.

[bitwize]

To close the loop, I had a chemistry professor who linked concepts together in lecture with the phrase "Meaning what?" E.g., "In the alkyne molecule, the carbon atoms share a triple bond. Meaning what? Meaning that the bond is much stronger than in alkanes or alkenes..." It was less a technique for getting attention and more for holding it through a chain of reasoning. But it worked.

[antognini]

I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."

[ErroneousBosh]

I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.