{"id":14756,"date":"2013-11-21T10:25:10","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T18:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2013\/11\/21\/because.html"},"modified":"2013-11-21T10:25:10","modified_gmt":"2013-11-21T18:25:10","slug":"because","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2013\/11\/21\/because\/","title":{"rendered":"because"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Half the people on my Facebook friends list have linked to an article by Megan Garber in the Atlantic<\/cite> titled “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet<\/a>,” about the growing use of the word because<\/i> in the structure “because noun<\/var>,” as in “because Internet” or “because FEELINGS” or “because Science!”<\/p>\n

That article draws on a bunch of other recent articles from the linguistoblogosphere, including one by Stan Carey<\/a> that goes into more detail and provides more links. The Atlantic<\/cite> also provides a cute followup by Alexis Madrigal categorizing becauses<\/a>, which roundaboutly reminds me of an old column of mine, “Matt Brocchini Explains It All to You<\/a>”; also of Jay and Elliott's Universal Explainer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I think the linguists' observations about because+noun are interesting (let's not call it “because-noun,” because confusing!), but so far I haven't seen anyone talk about it specifically as a shortening of the phrase “because of,” which seems to me to be the most likely derivation. It's expanded beyond that by now; in some contexts it can be thought of as short for “because that is” or “because I like” or all sorts of other things. But I think it's closer in structure to a shortened form of “because of” than to (for example) a shortened version of “because, hey,” which was one linguist's suggestion for an earlier similar construction.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Half the people on my Facebook friends list have linked to an article by Megan Garber in the Atlantic titled “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet,” about the growing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,83,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-change","category-specific-words","category-usage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}