‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar

If the title of this post made perfect sense to you, then you’re way ahead of me. But just in case, we’d best recap. Neal Whitman wrote a good article at Grammar Girl recently on the possible origins of because as a standalone preposition. This helpful passage from Whitman sets out the context:

In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to form what’s called a compound preposition. For example, “Aardvark was late because of heavy traffic.” In the past three or four years, though, a new usage for “because” has been developing.

The new usage – older than 3–4 years, mind – is what Laura Bailey and Mark Liberman, respectively, have referred to as “because+noun” and “because NOUN”. Liberman says the idiom usually seems to imply “that the referenced line of reasoning is weak”. Sometimes, yes, but it’s also commonly used just for convenience, or effect: No work tomorrow because holidays!; Of course evolution is true, because science.

Because X is fashionably slangy at the moment, diffusing rapidly across communities. It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone. Because time-strapped. Maybe the causal factor is so obvious as to need no elaboration, or the speaker is distracted or giddy, or online and eager to save effort and move on, or maybe the construction appeals for undefined aesthetic or social reasons.

Gretchen McCulloch, at All Things Linguistic, points out that there seem to be restrictions on what kind of noun phrases can occur here. Providing examples of what works and doesn’t work for her (e.g., Yes to: I can’t come out tonight because homework/essays; No to: I can’t come out tonight because lots of homework/this essay), she concludes:

it seems like the because+noun construction really must consist of a bare noun, not a noun with a determiner or an adjective. However, I think I might be able to be okay with:

? I can never get to bed at a reasonable hour because interesting people on the internet!

With new usages, as with old ones, what works or doesn’t varies from person to person. Bare nouns certainly seem more common in the X slot, and tend to carry more emphasis, but I’ve seen longer noun phrases, and other classes of words, used too; there are examples below.

The construction is more versatile than “because+noun” suggests. Prepositional because can be yoked to verbs (Can’t talk now because cooking), adjectives (making up examples because lazy), interjections (Because yay!), and maybe adverbs too, though in strings like Because honestly., the adverb is functioning more as an exclamation. The resulting phrases are all similarly succinct and expressive.

Here are some examples from Twitter, categorised by grammatical class:

Nouns, noun phrases, proper nouns:

Dow closes at record high for 35th time this year because Obama http://t.co/XKDwq67K5D—
The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) November 11, 2013

Swear I can't be the only one who really doesn't give a shit about the color of m&m's and just eats them by the mouthful because chocolate.—
nate (@Nate_Fair) November 12, 2013

School because studying. Studying because school.—
Andre Perrard (@AndreTAMU15) November 12, 2013

What if Chris is trolling again and actually is going to be the doctor but has to say he isn't because secret reasons?—
Bad Wolf (@_colour_bandit) March 24, 2013

rewatching teen wolf because feels—
lauren (@krejface) November 11, 2013

(Feels in the last tweet is a popular slang abbreviation of feelings, especially in the sense of strong or overwhelming emotion.)

Verbs:

Bye going to study for English because didn't finish this morning because fell asleep—
~ 19 days / tired (@charminrauhl) November 10, 2013

stomach ache because laughing lol—
StyPayHorLikSon♥ (@reverd1d) November 12, 2013

Hot cocoa because need.—
Johanna (@JoWesterhof) November 12, 2013

Would a perfume ban violate the First Amendment? Is that expression? Because want.—
Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) November 07, 2013

Those moments when you choose to eat a salad not because you want salad… but because want croutons.—
Rebekah Loper (@RebekahLoper) November 07, 2013

Adjectives:

Going to bed way early because exhausted:/—
Morgan♡ (@_mo_mo37) November 07, 2013

PREDICTION: Zach Edwards will be ESPN's impact player against Rutgers next week because random.—
Cincy on the Prowl (@CincyOTProwl) November 09, 2013

{Falls on her bed and cuddles pillows because tired}—
Devanhi Evergrace (@MirkwoodsMuse) November 13, 2013

A lot of people should really start thinking before they talk because stupid.—
Clayton Collins (@ClaytonJCollins) August 16, 2013

Interjections:

I need to talk to my cousin too. because oooh !—
Kimani✌ ♥ (@CaylaKx3) November 12, 2013

That feeling you get when you finish an essay and you just want to cry because yay—
Alexis Isaacson (@AlexisIsaacson) November 12, 2013

I might suggest taking @KameronHurley's suggestion and talking about stuff you like today using the hashtag #thingsilike. Because YAY THINGS—
Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) September 10, 2013

Admittedly, not in the UK yet, because aargh.—
Richard Cobbett (@richardcobbett) June 10, 2013

Uhmmm I wish my friend would of told me about windows down sooner because #woohoo—
I Love you Connor (@JessupFan) August 26, 2012

*

On Language Log I left a comment (before I’d checked) suggesting the usage could’ve come from the “because race car” meme of 2011. But corpus searches show examples from years before that. GloWbE has loads, with many of the noun phrases recurring – science, math, people, art, reasons, comedy, bacon, ineptitude, fun, patriarchy, politics, school, intersectionality, and winner all show up at least twice in the X slot.

Scanning COHA and COCA for similar constructions, I found examples from ABC’s This Week, 2012: “I’m supporting the Patriots because Patriots.”; CNN’s Larry King Show, 2001: “And of course, that was last thing in the world she would do because publicity.” (though the omission of a definite article makes me wonder if it was poorly transcribed); and NBC’s Dateline, 2005:

I definitely kind of viewed him as a suspect.

Why?

Well, because motive.

Fox News Sunday, 15 years ago, has: “And Primary Colors I think has hit the country like a dud, because behavior. It’s not inspiring.” But I’m not sure: it may be more like “because behaviour, it’s not inspiring”, where the noun is fronted and the grammar, though loose, doesn’t use the prepositional because we’re looking at. Ditto this from Ebony, 2007: “People die of heart attacks and strokes because diabetes. It is one of the more underlisted causes of death…”

Written examples of prepositional because aren’t rare, but they’re pretty much unheard of in edited text, except where it’s reported speech. COCA offers the following, from the Roeper Review, 1996: “But motivation alone does not assure success: ‘Because circumstances. I was just lucky, really…’”

There’s also an old and standard construction that’s superficially very similar to prepositional because. The last time I remember seeing it was in Final Cut, Steven Bach’s book on the making of Heaven’s Gate:

It was pointed out that there seemed to be plenty of time for endless reexamination of footage or for monomaniacal reworking of technical processes, but those all were justified in the name of Art, while seeing how the picture played before an audience was both pointless, because Cimino knew how it would play, and ignoble because a question of mere Commerce.

It’s different, though, because elliptical. Bach’s “ignoble because a question…” is a grammatical elision of “ignoble because it was a question…”. Our non-standard idiom, by contrast, isn’t eliding particular words – it’s substituting for a whole, possibly vague, train of thought, and could take the form “because Commerce(!)”. Bach’s couldn’t.

[Analogous examples, from Time magazine, 1929: “Professor Einstein holds that perception is generally false because relative.”; and Michele Vialet, 2002: “The price for failing to heed this warning and do justice to the fundamental polyphony of any society is a second outburst of violence, more extreme than the first occurrence because self-annihilating.”]

But back to prepositional because. Where did it come from? No one is quite sure. Neal Whitman agrees with Language Log commenters who think it could be from “Because hey”–type sentences (If life gives you lemons, keep them, because, hey, free lemons), where hey functions “like an adaptor, letting you shift from the ordinary speech register to this casual and condensed register”. And then people started dropping the hey.

It’s not always hey, either: take this line from the linguistically trend-setting Buffy, season 5 (January 2001): “I don’t even get how we made that guy, because, wow, advanced!” There may also be forerunners in child–parent exchanges like “Why? That’s the why” and “Why? Because.”; and in the popular insults “Because shut up” and “Because fuck you, that’s why.”

However it arose, it seems to be spreading. Language loves economy, and the sheer efficiency of this use of because is likely boosting its popularity. Similar constructions are occurring with but, also, so, thus and similar words – see the frame from xkcd, above. And in the Language Log thread (which is worth reading in full), Rod Johnson says a friend “ended a litany of miscellaneous complaints with ‘In conclusion, STUFF.’” All these syntactic compressions may be reinforcing each other.

I’ve used the construction myself, though not often. On Twitter a year ago I was asked if there’s a “male equivalent of feminist”, and because of the medium’s spatial limitations (and because I was impulsively drawn to the unorthodox syntax) I said: “No precise equivalent, because patriarchy, but ‘masculist’/'masculinist’ is closest. Interpretations of it vary a lot.”

Is prepositional-because grammatical? Sure. Not in Standard English, of course. But lots of people are using it in a systematic and semantically transparent way. It has obvious appeal in a range of informal contexts, though whether it manages ultimately to insinuate itself into more formally acceptable usage remains to be seen.

You needn’t use or like this usage of because, and you might even find it annoying, but there’s nothing linguistically problematic about it. Because grammar weirds, because language.