Learned is a weekly newsletter about words and language, written by me (
This week's excerpt is from the main section of Learned, where I talk about phrases and idioms we all know, but may not know the exact source of. This time, I discuss the phrase so it goes.
In Slaughterhouse-Five , Billy Pilgrim sees yet another person - a friend, an enemy, a person of no consequence - fall dead before him. “So it goes,” says Billy, suggesting that death is inevitable and worth commenting on only because of its contrast to our most precious commodity.
In fact, the phrase is repeated all throughout the novel, every time someone dies, driving home the matter-of-factness with which death occurs. As a more recent anti-hero might have put it, “ Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives .”
In the years since, Kurt Vonnegut’s signature phrase has become an idiom in its own regard:
Billy Joel uses it as a mea culpa: “ And so it goes, and so it goes. And so will you I suppose. ”
Taylor Swift, on the other hand, uses it to excuse a lover’s bad treatment of her, “ Getting caught up in the moment, lipstick on your face, so it goes… ”
And, then, of course, there are any of the other dozen use cases listed on Wikipedia’s disambiguation page - all of them share a lack of cynicism. Instead, so it goes is almost stoic, an acceptance of change as the only constant in life’s ups and downs.
Mac Millar ended his final album with a song titled “So It Goes,” a lament against the stresses of fame and others’ expectations. From Genius.com :
Here, Mac wields the phrase to respond to the clinging of fame and the accumulation of wealth with the same fatalism Vonnegut intended, and like Vonnegut, the phrase repeats itself in a variety of manners both out of place and in-line with the narrative.
I read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school. My English teachers in my freshman and sophomore years, whether through accident or design, gave me a crash course in dystopian fatalism: Slaughterhouse-Five came on deck just after Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World and right before Animal Farm and All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a hell of a list.
And that list is full of great quotes and cool phrasings, but very few of them have become full-on idioms, like so it goes has done. So, why that phrasing? Why, so it goes? It’s not like we don’t have a plethora of similarly themed phrases in English; what is it about those three words in that order that grabs our attention so thoroughly?
I’m only speculating and speaking for myself, but I think it’s a combination of the simplicity , the internal rhyme , and_the rule of threes_. Look at any reference on the great poems of the English language and you’ll find those annotations all over the place. (And, to be clear, I’m not suggesting Vonnegut originated the phrase because I don’t think he did. My sources all converge on “popularized,” meaning that it was a saying long before Vonnegut, but not one in common usage as an idiom until Slaughterhouse-Five.)
I wonder how much of that was intentional on Vonnegut’s part. How much work did he put into that sentence. Did he revise it from “That’s how it goes.” Or, “tough breaks.” Or even one of the more common idioms, like “that’s life.” Maybe it just came to him, one of those unseeable, unknowable moments of inspiration that rain on us like solar radiation, perfectly benign until it radically alters your cell structure.
That answer might be out there, but I’m not going to look for it. I’d rather not know. After all, what good would come of my knowing? Better to speculate and to imagine than to remove the mystery and the magic. So it goes.