What's fascinating to me is that, unlike so many other language "changes", this isn't caused by laziness or carelessness. This seems to be a rare case where removing words adds information, rather than removing it: "The talks failed because of politics" means roughly what it says, while "The talks failed because politics" means roughly "The talks failed because of politics, which is the kind of thing that always happens when politics are involved".
Any linguists care to comment whether there's a term for this kind of meaning compression? "Idiom" doesn't quite seem to cover it.
I think "idiom" is an apt description. It's a compact phrase that conveys at least two layers of meaning. Most importantly, one of those meanings cannot simply be parsed from the direct syntax & vocabulary that make up the phrase, but relies on the cultural familiarity with the phrase and its common usage.
I do wonder, though, how long this secondary meaning will last. Right now the dismissive connotation comes about because the phrase stands out, because it breaks the rules in order to be overly brief. If the phrase gets used more, and especially as a new generation never grows up not hearing it, it will not stand out anymore as an unconventional. It could just become grammatical. Without that element, it could easily lose its dismissive connotation.
This is kind of exciting to watch, in a nerdy sort of way. Language evolution doesn't really happen much in literate societies like ours, so it's neat that we have an example unfolding before our eyes.
I'd call it a grammatical construction. Your brain already knows how to "typecast" a noun to a reason ("Why didn't the bill pass?" "I don't know. Politics."), it's just not usually grammatically "licensed" in this case. If you've been infected by the "because [noun]" meme, however, you have a construction in your vocabulary (we could say in your idiolect) that can be invoked to explain any instances of "because [noun]" you come across, with all the associated connotations you learned along with it.
It's similar to "Suddenly, bananas!" or "I accidentally the whole thing." I wish I could remember all the strange grammar I heard at MIT. Communities like the hacker community and 4chan are fertile ground for new grammatical constructions because people pick up and repeat the ones they hear while trying to preserve their meaning and connotations.
I still occasionally burst out laughing when I hear a funny turn of phrase at Meteor (which has a lot of MIT people).
The closest thing I can think of to the removed word is not "of" but the Spanish "hay" (pronounced like "I"), which has no clear English analogue, but it means roughly "there is" or "the present state of affairs includes". The talks failed because hay politics (there is politics), the sandwich is delicious because hay bacon (it has bacon), you should go to the planetarium because hay space (there is [the profundity of our relationship to the cosmos]), where in the last case we also consider the context of the word "space" (nobody would here say "because cosmos!").
>>"The talks failed because of politics" means roughly what it says, while "The talks failed because politics" means roughly "The talks failed because of politics, which is the kind of thing that always happens when politics are involved"
Well, no. It actually alludes to the fact that politics was the hand-wavy excuse used to describe why the talks failed.
It goes back to "X happened because aliens." As in, we can't explain why it happened, therefore we'll just say it was aliens that did it.
Some of this might be caused by increased use of smartphones for posting on the Facebook, tweeting, and texting. I'm not sure laziness is the right word, but conservation of characters is certainly a goal.
As far as laziness, I'll disagree with you. Hardly ever is a "because X" clause well thought out or witty. I think it's safe to assume there is some serious mental laziness happening when you see a "prepositional because" being used.
> This seems to be a rare case where removing words adds information
Words aren't being removed, but the word because is being added to a very old speech pattern.
"The talks failed because politics" is an expansion of "The talks failed: politics", with a pause between failed and politics, and politics spoken like a new one-word sentence, usually at a slightly different pitch level than The talks failed. It's meaning and intonation pattern is quite different to "The talks failed because of politics".
When saying "The talks failed because politics" out loud, we still put a pause before politics, and use the same intonation pattern as "The talks failed: politics". The word because replaces the terser colon in the written form.
amazingly, something similar can be observed in Russian language as well. In casual speech, one can explain the reason for something using потому что (because) followed by a noun (e.g. "потому что политика! - "because politics!"), followed by end of sentence. Which I'm not entirely sure is grammatically correct, however it has an effect similar to what you mentioned.
Somewhat related to the concept of "deixis" or "indexicality" - phrases whose meaning can vary depending on contextual information. "Because politics" could mean one thing in a dysfunctional country, and entirely another in an extremely well-run one.
Maybe it's just me, but the "prepositional because" is usually deprecative of the subject. The article details the implications of the prepositional because:
"It conveys focus... It conveys brevity... But it also conveys a certain universality."
People use it when they're busy, drunk, or absent-minded to be self-deprecative. As in:
"Maxed out my credit card because too much beer!"
But people also use it to disparage someone else:
"Uptown a*&%$# voted against prop B because racism."
The article briefly hints at this when it says, "So we get comments like these, with people using 'because' not just to explain, but also to criticize, and sensationalize, and ironize...".
In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of a "because X" clause that has complimentary implications.
However, it's possible that the implications of this preposition has softened recently and I'm out of the loop. Or maybe I'm just overthinking it.
EDIT: Maybe it's just me but "because bacon" and "because awesome" do not imply that the subject of the sentence is a person with qualities worth aspiring to. Not that bacon isn't awesome.
I don't think this is a likely construction because it's too precise. It's too close in meaning to "maxed out my credit card because of too much beer." A more likely one would be "maxed out my credit card because beer" or even "maxed out my credit card because priorities," in which the context ironically implicates overspending on beer."
I'm not yet convinced that this is something one can use and not get laughed at for quite yet. It's fine for informal communications because your readers are probably not too literate, but I fear that this might still confuse an older generation used to more formal grammatical constructions.
All of the examples are just social media wanking, as far as I can tell, so probably not indicative of any actual shift in how people are using English to tell a story. "Skipping lunch because sleep." OK. Who the fuck cares?
Ultimately, the human brain can error-correct over gross misuse of language; plenty of people speak without using articles, mess up "his" and "her" and "he" or "she", spell the world "you" as "u", choose the wrong word when their are homonyms, or wr173 411 7h31r s3n73n(3s l1|<3 7h15. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to invoke the error correction machinery when the message isn't actually corrupted; it would be pretty fatiguing to read Neal Stephenson in l337 speak. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because humans.
Huh. This new form of "because" in an actual, intended-to-be-grammatically-correct sentence sounds weird to me and I don't think I personally use it at all. Isn't it just "because of" without the "of" when people are in a rush, typing on a tiny keyboard or just plain lazy? Or when the intent is to construct a witty, purposefully broken sentence?
The intent is often to construct a purposefully broken sentence, mirroring the broken logic that comes next. The word after because would only satisfy the question "why?" if you're a moron.
I put bacon in my salad. [why?] Because bacon.
That explains absolutely nothing, the implication being that if you're asking why, you're a moron and nothing more can be explained to you because bacon is so overwhelmingly and obviously self-justifying. Other interpretations abound as well.
(Someone elsewhere in the thread said the "because" construction was unusual because prepositions evolve more slowly than words of other parts of speech in English; this is true, but conjunctions typically move slowest of all. Such times we live in...)
Ah that's really cool to see a relatively rare phenomenon like that happening in real time. Also fascinating that the author used Facebook feeds as a source. That seems like it could be a very, very powerful tool for linguistics.
The privacy issues are obvious, but imagine being able to trace the spread of new language construction as it propagates through a population.
I first heard this construct in a Deep Thought by Jack Handey, from the mid-nineties I believe:
"After I die, wherever my spirit goes, I'm going to try to get back and visit my skeleton at least once a year, because, 'Hey, old buddy, how's it going?'."
I still laugh about it, and the main reason it was funny to me was the odd (but humorously apropos) use of the word "because."
It's not really a new preposition, per se. It's a type of joke. Every occurrence cited here is using it in a jokey fashion. It seems to me you may as well say potatoes are a common topic of conversation on the Internet because of Latvian jokes.
> It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]).
Seems to me that you are correct, this 'new usage' is merely the latter usage without 'of'.
We are educated to speak well our language (english, german, french, ....) and most western languages require the speaker to be fully specific. The extent of this varies from language to language, for example, in italian it's grammatical and accepted to say "chi sono?" [who am?] while in english it's not, despite the fact that the "am" means only first person singular. Similar rules are governing the use of articles.
However, there are many languages in the world, especially in east Asia, which take this even further and it's perfectly fine for you to omit large parts of discourse. And it's not only because they are implied, but because the lack of specification means something.
IANAL but I think here we are witnessing a similar a similar development. Probably these things happen often in any language, but education tends to punish "bad language" usage whenever it doesn't fit some established grammatical rules. Split infinitives are another example of that.
There's other ways of expanding the "because-noun" construction. I've occasionally posted a link to Facebook with a comment like "This is incredibly awesome and you should read this, because SPACE." In this case, the construct expands to something like "...because it has to do with space, which I consider to be inherently awesome."
"Because-noun," it would appear, can be construed multiple ways, and a lot of the meaning is contextual.
I am not so sure internet idioms are of the same class as professionally written English structure. Otherwise UrbanDictionary and RapGenius should serve as the sources for today's written English.
These are two different genres. It's interesting to ask when something becomes so widely accepted that it is considered fine to use in "proper" english writing. If "because X" is, then so is LOL.
LOL was added to the OED a couple of years ago [1]. The point of this article is that there have been enough sighting of "because [noun]" in the wild in enough different contexts that it is starting to make that leap into the mainstream, beyond just UrbanDuctionary and it's ilk.
The grammatical class of prepositions changes considerably more slowly than other classes.
We need new nouns and new verbs all the time, because what occupies and what occurs in our environment changes so fast. Interestingly, despite that rapid change, the set of prepositions, the set of conceptual relationships we've chosen to concisely express, stays pretty steady.
It's fascinating to read about a new preposition entering into common usage, because it makes me wonder what new pressures we're collectively facing in describing conceptual relationships. Certainly it could just be Twitter's character limits causing people to drop the "of" in "because of", but maybe other forces caused this construction to have utility now.
My bet would be on an increased expectation that our conversational partners share our context, and our models for understanding why things happen the way they do, because internet.
I have always seen "Because noun" as being a dismissive "Don't think to hard about it; that is just the way it is" reason. Or for a situation where there is no rational explanation.
e.g.
A: "Why do some people have such a fetich for eating tiger penis"
On one hand, this doesn't bother me much because it's mostly just a mutation of "because of" which I already avoid using. You can usually rework "because of <noun>" into "because <phrase>" and produce a sentence that, in my experience, better expresses what the speaker actually intends.
On the other hand, "because <noun>" is extremely inexact:
> English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
What about the Internet caused English to gain a new preposition? Unless you already understand, "because <noun>" adds little, if any, explanation. I can see its use as a handy short-hand when your audience does already understand though.
Yes. It's an invocation, rather than an explanation. That's one of the interesting things about it; it's effectively a reversal of the original meaning of the word "because".
It has a different meaning than because of though. Two examples:
Bacon milkshake because bacon.
Bacon milkshake because of bacon.
The second one doesn't carry the flippant implication of the unquestionable awesomeness of bacon. You don't get to argue the point with the first one. The second one might be up to debate. There's far more to communication that just facts. There's emotional content that gets captured as well.
In 1914, W.B. Yeats published the book Responsibilities. The first poem, "Pardon Old Fathers" included the lines "And you, silent and fierce old man/Because the daily spectacle that stirred/My fancy...".
Anyway, that's the way it reads in the Collected Poems I bought long ago. To be sure, if you Google for "Pardon Old Fathers", the versions you find will say "Because of the spectacle". Is that on account of the Internet's (because the Internet's) jealousy?
[+] [-] alex_c|12 years ago|reply
Any linguists care to comment whether there's a term for this kind of meaning compression? "Idiom" doesn't quite seem to cover it.
[+] [-] lmkg|12 years ago|reply
I do wonder, though, how long this secondary meaning will last. Right now the dismissive connotation comes about because the phrase stands out, because it breaks the rules in order to be overly brief. If the phrase gets used more, and especially as a new generation never grows up not hearing it, it will not stand out anymore as an unconventional. It could just become grammatical. Without that element, it could easily lose its dismissive connotation.
This is kind of exciting to watch, in a nerdy sort of way. Language evolution doesn't really happen much in literate societies like ours, so it's neat that we have an example unfolding before our eyes.
[+] [-] dgreensp|12 years ago|reply
It's similar to "Suddenly, bananas!" or "I accidentally the whole thing." I wish I could remember all the strange grammar I heard at MIT. Communities like the hacker community and 4chan are fertile ground for new grammatical constructions because people pick up and repeat the ones they hear while trying to preserve their meaning and connotations.
I still occasionally burst out laughing when I hear a funny turn of phrase at Meteor (which has a lot of MIT people).
Funny language is funny.
[+] [-] scythe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russell|12 years ago|reply
It took me a few seconds to get my head around that one.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
Well, no. It actually alludes to the fact that politics was the hand-wavy excuse used to describe why the talks failed.
It goes back to "X happened because aliens." As in, we can't explain why it happened, therefore we'll just say it was aliens that did it.
[+] [-] humanrebar|12 years ago|reply
Some of this might be caused by increased use of smartphones for posting on the Facebook, tweeting, and texting. I'm not sure laziness is the right word, but conservation of characters is certainly a goal.
As far as laziness, I'll disagree with you. Hardly ever is a "because X" clause well thought out or witty. I think it's safe to assume there is some serious mental laziness happening when you see a "prepositional because" being used.
[+] [-] vorg|12 years ago|reply
Words aren't being removed, but the word because is being added to a very old speech pattern.
"The talks failed because politics" is an expansion of "The talks failed: politics", with a pause between failed and politics, and politics spoken like a new one-word sentence, usually at a slightly different pitch level than The talks failed. It's meaning and intonation pattern is quite different to "The talks failed because of politics".
When saying "The talks failed because politics" out loud, we still put a pause before politics, and use the same intonation pattern as "The talks failed: politics". The word because replaces the terser colon in the written form.
[+] [-] Alex_Jiang|12 years ago|reply
"Because politics" is like saying "because politics are just crazy like that."
It's a flippant way of saying something is simply absurd. Or an issue is pretty much binary.
[+] [-] 10098|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinwd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
Because Katz.
[+] [-] humanrebar|12 years ago|reply
"It conveys focus... It conveys brevity... But it also conveys a certain universality."
People use it when they're busy, drunk, or absent-minded to be self-deprecative. As in:
"Maxed out my credit card because too much beer!"
But people also use it to disparage someone else:
"Uptown a*&%$# voted against prop B because racism."
The article briefly hints at this when it says, "So we get comments like these, with people using 'because' not just to explain, but also to criticize, and sensationalize, and ironize...".
In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of a "because X" clause that has complimentary implications.
However, it's possible that the implications of this preposition has softened recently and I'm out of the loop. Or maybe I'm just overthinking it.
EDIT: Maybe it's just me but "because bacon" and "because awesome" do not imply that the subject of the sentence is a person with qualities worth aspiring to. Not that bacon isn't awesome.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|12 years ago|reply
I added bacon to my milkshake because delicious.
I don't normally like superhero movies, but I went to see the Avengers, because Joss Whedon.
[+] [-] saraid216|12 years ago|reply
"I have breakfast for all three meals because bacon."
[+] [-] maccam94|12 years ago|reply
"Now put x with y, because awesome!"
[+] [-] jrockway|12 years ago|reply
All of the examples are just social media wanking, as far as I can tell, so probably not indicative of any actual shift in how people are using English to tell a story. "Skipping lunch because sleep." OK. Who the fuck cares?
Ultimately, the human brain can error-correct over gross misuse of language; plenty of people speak without using articles, mess up "his" and "her" and "he" or "she", spell the world "you" as "u", choose the wrong word when their are homonyms, or wr173 411 7h31r s3n73n(3s l1|<3 7h15. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to invoke the error correction machinery when the message isn't actually corrupted; it would be pretty fatiguing to read Neal Stephenson in l337 speak. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because humans.
[+] [-] eru|12 years ago|reply
They didn't start out as formal constructions, just pick up any lament about the decline of language from, say, the 19th century.
[+] [-] zaphar|12 years ago|reply
The first time I heard it I instantly knew what it was and then I thought. "That's a clever language hack".
[+] [-] zaphar|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dnautics|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Oldest usage, as found by google:
http://www.dkvine.com/games/dkl3/ (2001), line 807 in the source; this is probably not the first usage in all of english.
[+] [-] __pThrow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benched|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozataman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedunangst|12 years ago|reply
I put bacon in my salad. [why?] Because bacon.
That explains absolutely nothing, the implication being that if you're asking why, you're a moron and nothing more can be explained to you because bacon is so overwhelmingly and obviously self-justifying. Other interpretations abound as well.
[+] [-] nhebb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elwell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apendleton|12 years ago|reply
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not...
(Someone elsewhere in the thread said the "because" construction was unusual because prepositions evolve more slowly than words of other parts of speech in English; this is true, but conjunctions typically move slowest of all. Such times we live in...)
[+] [-] bglazer|12 years ago|reply
The privacy issues are obvious, but imagine being able to trace the spread of new language construction as it propagates through a population.
[+] [-] c0achmcguirk|12 years ago|reply
"After I die, wherever my spirit goes, I'm going to try to get back and visit my skeleton at least once a year, because, 'Hey, old buddy, how's it going?'."
I still laugh about it, and the main reason it was funny to me was the odd (but humorously apropos) use of the word "because."
[+] [-] chc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|12 years ago|reply
> It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]).
Seems to me that you are correct, this 'new usage' is merely the latter usage without 'of'.
[+] [-] ithkuil|12 years ago|reply
However, there are many languages in the world, especially in east Asia, which take this even further and it's perfectly fine for you to omit large parts of discourse. And it's not only because they are implied, but because the lack of specification means something.
IANAL but I think here we are witnessing a similar a similar development. Probably these things happen often in any language, but education tends to punish "bad language" usage whenever it doesn't fit some established grammatical rules. Split infinitives are another example of that.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cenhyperion|12 years ago|reply
So "Why do you look so distraught?" "Because PHP" "I am so sorry."
[+] [-] erbo|12 years ago|reply
"Because-noun," it would appear, can be construed multiple ways, and a lot of the meaning is contextual.
[+] [-] EGreg|12 years ago|reply
These are two different genres. It's interesting to ask when something becomes so widely accepted that it is considered fine to use in "proper" english writing. If "because X" is, then so is LOL.
Incorporate ALL THE THINGS!
[+] [-] sparky_z|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12893416
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anakanemison|12 years ago|reply
We need new nouns and new verbs all the time, because what occupies and what occurs in our environment changes so fast. Interestingly, despite that rapid change, the set of prepositions, the set of conceptual relationships we've chosen to concisely express, stays pretty steady.
It's fascinating to read about a new preposition entering into common usage, because it makes me wonder what new pressures we're collectively facing in describing conceptual relationships. Certainly it could just be Twitter's character limits causing people to drop the "of" in "because of", but maybe other forces caused this construction to have utility now.
My bet would be on an increased expectation that our conversational partners share our context, and our models for understanding why things happen the way they do, because internet.
[+] [-] powertower|12 years ago|reply
> Skipping lunch today because sleep.
What is that supposed to mean? You need to take a nap during lunch; you got too much sleep the night before and are groggy, etc.
Why not add a few more words to make the sentence understandable (in this case non-ambiguous).
[+] [-] rurounijones|12 years ago|reply
e.g.
A: "Why do some people have such a fetich for eating tiger penis"
B: "Because china"
Am I alone in this?
[+] [-] Mindless2112|12 years ago|reply
On the other hand, "because <noun>" is extremely inexact:
> English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
What about the Internet caused English to gain a new preposition? Unless you already understand, "because <noun>" adds little, if any, explanation. I can see its use as a handy short-hand when your audience does already understand though.
[+] [-] saraid216|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epochwolf|12 years ago|reply
Bacon milkshake because bacon.
Bacon milkshake because of bacon.
The second one doesn't carry the flippant implication of the unquestionable awesomeness of bacon. You don't get to argue the point with the first one. The second one might be up to debate. There's far more to communication that just facts. There's emotional content that gets captured as well.
[+] [-] cafard|12 years ago|reply
Anyway, that's the way it reads in the Collected Poems I bought long ago. To be sure, if you Google for "Pardon Old Fathers", the versions you find will say "Because of the spectacle". Is that on account of the Internet's (because the Internet's) jealousy?