For 24 years, the American Dialect Society has chosen a Word of the Year at its annual meeting in January. Typically, the word has been a noun or verb that has risen to prominence during the previous year. For example, the 2011 WOTY was the verb occupy, and the 2012 WOTY was the noun hashtag. Sometimes it’s even an adjective, as in 2007, when the winner was subprime.
But this year, strong candidates such as selfie and twerk ultimately lost to a word that isn’t a noun, verb, or adjective; doesn’t describe some cultural phenomenon; and has been in continuous use in English for more than 700 years: because.
How did that happen?
It has to do with a new development in the syntax of because. Here’s what Ben Zimmer wrote about it in his recap of the WOTY voting in his Word Routes column:
[B]ecause … in traditional grammar introduces a full clause stating a reason («I love ice cream because it’s delicious«) or works together with of to introduce an explanatory noun («I love ice cream because of its delicious flavor«). What has been happening lately online, especially on Twitter and Tumblr, is that people use because with a more terse follow-up: introducing a noun («I love ice cream because flavor«), an adjective («I love ice cream because delicious«), or an interjection («I love ice cream because yum!«).
I wrote about this phenomenon in an episode of Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl podcast in October. At the time, I referred to the construction as «because NOUN,» taking the name from two blog posts from 2012, one written by Laura Bailey on her Linguist Laura blog, the other by Mark Liberman on Language Log.
The following month, Stan Carey wrote about it on his Sentence First blog, kindly linking to my Grammar Girl piece as well as the original sources I’d cited. He noted that it wasn’t just nouns that could follow because in this way (see Zimmer’s examples above), and also highlighted what Gretchen McCulloch, another linguist-blogger had said on her All Things Linguistic blog, back in 2012: not just any noun or noun phrase worked in this construction. For that reason, Carey chose to call it «because X» instead of «because NOUN» or «because as a preposition.»
Carey’s post is what seems to have started the fire. One week later, Megan Garber published an article on because in The Atlantic, and other blogs and online news sources followed. Carey’s post, meanwhile, continued to rack up comments for the next month, 108 at time of this writing. Carey also updated his post to include links to the articles in The Atlantic and other places.
Some of these articles sum up the new usage by saying that because has become a preposition. For example, Fogarty titled the Grammar Girl episode «Because as a Preposition,» Carey and Garber referred to a «new preposition» in their titles. However, as McCulloch wrote in a new blog post following the WOTY vote, «It’s not that because is newly a preposition: depending on your definition, it’s either still not a preposition or it always has been.» She’s right. I didn’t bring this up in the Grammar Girl episode, because I didn’t want to get too hardcore on the listening audience, but if you’ve read this far, I think you can handle it. Let’s review exactly what part of speech because is.
Traditionally, when because introduces a clause, such as «Many flights were canceled because a polar vortex was creating hazardous conditions,» it has been called a subordinating conjunction. However, Rodney Huddleston and Geoff Pullum argue in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that because, along with most other subordinating conjunctions (except for that, whether, and the whether-substitute if) should be classified as … prepositions. Some prepositions, such as after, can take clauses or noun phrases as complements: «after we woke up,» «after the storm.»
Other prepositions, like with, take only noun phrases: «with a telescope,» but «with we arrived at the party» is not. And still others, like although, take only clausal complements, as in «although they’d done nothing wrong,» but not «although you.» But they’re still all prepositions, Huddleston and Pullum argue, just like remember is still a verb, whether it takes a noun phrase complement («Remember the Alamo!»), an infinitival complement («remember to pay the water bill»), or a that-clause («remembered that he had an appointment»). For further arguments, see pages 1011-1014 in CGEL, or see this Language Log post by Pullum, following the election of because as WOTY.
What about because followed by an of-prepositional phrase, as in because of you? In the Grammar Girl episode, I went with traditional grammarians and said the bigram because of was a compound preposition. But this stance is untenable in light of the examples in Pullum’s blog post, in which the because and the of are separated by other words or phrases. Instead, we just say that in addition to clausal complements, the preposition because can take of-prepositional phrases as complements.
And finally, we come to because X. If X is a noun phrase, then all that means is that after 700 years, because has gained a bit more functionality as a preposition, and like before and after, can now take both clausal and noun phrase complements. When you look at it that way, it’s no more exciting than the fact that people now say graduated college as well as graduated from college. Either way, graduate is still a verb.
So yes, because is a preposition, but not on account of this new usage. But there’s still the question of exactly what kind of complement this particular prepositional flavor of because takes. In her most recent blog post on this topic, Gretchen McCulloch grapples with the variety of, and restrictions on, X in because X. Her generalization is that whether it’s a bare noun, a full noun phrase, an adjective, a verb, or an interjection, the X component has to be able to stand alone as an utterance. Interjections can certainly do this: Yay! Duh! So can some noun and adjective phrases: No school! Awesome! So can some verbs: Want! But not all nouns, adjectives, and verbs can stand alone, and those that can’t are not compatible with because X. For example, McCulloch points out that «because want» is common, but «because desire» is not.
As for the meaning of because X, many of the commenters on the blog posts have stated that people who use it are being humorous or cynical: The idea is that these speakers are taking on the point of view of someone so excited, distracted, stupid, or inarticulate that they can’t be bothered to explain their reasons in full. This is true, especially in some of the earlier examples of because X, which take the form because, hey, X, or because, y’know, X, noted in 2011 by John Baker on the American Dialect Society’s email list.The hey or y’know signals the speaker’s difficulty in articulating the full thought.
However, the freshest examples of because X don’t fit McCulloch’s rule that X can stand alone, and they’re not used ironically. In my piece for Grammar Girl, I began with quotations from an article in Slate, in which young children explained their choices for their favorite Pixar movies. As I wrote there:
A five-year-old chose Toy Story 2, «Because Evil Emperor Zurg!» A four-year-old liked Monster Inc. «Because the day care.» A six-year-old chose Monsters University, «because the part where Sully has the big roar and scares all the policemen.»
«Because the part where Sully has the big roar and scares all the policemen» — a straightforward and articulate reason, expressed in a complex noun phrase that can’t stand alone as a complete thought. To quote myself again, I offered this explanation:
As for the transition from the sarcastic usage to the sarcasm-free usage by younger speakers, we know that irony goes right over kids’ heads. As they’re learning the language as toddlers, they hear «Because NOUN» and just put it in with all the other grammar they’re learning.
So in the future, we might have not just one new use of because as a preposition, but two: the exclamatory because X, where X can be anything uttered with feeling, and the more pedestrian because X, where X is a noun phrase (or maybe an adjective phrase). This version of because will mean the same thing as because of, and might well come to replace it, because shorter.
For 24 years, the American Dialect Society has chosen a Word of the Year at its annual meeting in January. Typically, the word has been a noun or verb that has risen to prominence during the previous year. For example, the 2011 WOTY was the verb occupy, and the 2012 WOTY was the noun hashtag. Sometimes it’s even an adjective, as in 2007, when the winner was subprime.
But this year, strong candidates such as selfie and twerk ultimately lost to a word that isn’t a noun, verb, or adjective; doesn’t describe some cultural phenomenon; and has been in continuous use in English for more than 700 years: because.
How did that happen?
It has to do with a new development in the syntax of because. Here’s what Ben Zimmer wrote about it in his recap of the WOTY voting in his Word Routes column:
[B]ecause … in traditional grammar introduces a full clause stating a reason («I love ice cream because it’s delicious«) or works together with of to introduce an explanatory noun («I love ice cream because of its delicious flavor«). What has been happening lately online, especially on Twitter and Tumblr, is that people use because with a more terse follow-up: introducing a noun («I love ice cream because flavor«), an adjective («I love ice cream because delicious«), or an interjection («I love ice cream because yum!«).
I wrote about this phenomenon in an episode of Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl podcast in October. At the time, I referred to the construction as «because NOUN,» taking the name from two blog posts from 2012, one written by Laura Bailey on her Linguist Laura blog, the other by Mark Liberman on Language Log.
The following month, Stan Carey wrote about it on his Sentence First blog, kindly linking to my Grammar Girl piece as well as the original sources I’d cited. He noted that it wasn’t just nouns that could follow because in this way (see Zimmer’s examples above), and also highlighted what Gretchen McCulloch, another linguist-blogger had said on her All Things Linguistic blog, back in 2012: not just any noun or noun phrase worked in this construction. For that reason, Carey chose to call it «because X» instead of «because NOUN» or «because as a preposition.»
Carey’s post is what seems to have started the fire. One week later, Megan Garber published an article on because in The Atlantic, and other blogs and online news sources followed. Carey’s post, meanwhile, continued to rack up comments for the next month, 108 at time of this writing. Carey also updated his post to include links to the articles in The Atlantic and other places.
Some of these articles sum up the new usage by saying that because has become a preposition. For example, Fogarty titled the Grammar Girl episode «Because as a Preposition,» Carey and Garber referred to a «new preposition» in their titles. However, as McCulloch wrote in a new blog post following the WOTY vote, «It’s not that because is newly a preposition: depending on your definition, it’s either still not a preposition or it always has been.» She’s right. I didn’t bring this up in the Grammar Girl episode, because I didn’t want to get too hardcore on the listening audience, but if you’ve read this far, I think you can handle it. Let’s review exactly what part of speech because is.
Traditionally, when because introduces a clause, such as «Many flights were canceled because a polar vortex was creating hazardous conditions,» it has been called a subordinating conjunction. However, Rodney Huddleston and Geoff Pullum argue in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that because, along with most other subordinating conjunctions (except for that, whether, and the whether-substitute if) should be classified as … prepositions. Some prepositions, such as after, can take clauses or noun phrases as complements: «after we woke up,» «after the storm.»
Other prepositions, like with, take only noun phrases: «with a telescope,» but «with we arrived at the party» is not. And still others, like although, take only clausal complements, as in «although they’d done nothing wrong,» but not «although you.» But they’re still all prepositions, Huddleston and Pullum argue, just like remember is still a verb, whether it takes a noun phrase complement («Remember the Alamo!»), an infinitival complement («remember to pay the water bill»), or a that-clause («remembered that he had an appointment»). For further arguments, see pages 1011-1014 in CGEL, or see this Language Log post by Pullum, following the election of because as WOTY.
What about because followed by an of-prepositional phrase, as in because of you? In the Grammar Girl episode, I went with traditional grammarians and said the bigram because of was a compound preposition. But this stance is untenable in light of the examples in Pullum’s blog post, in which the because and the of are separated by other words or phrases. Instead, we just say that in addition to clausal complements, the preposition because can take of-prepositional phrases as complements.
And finally, we come to because X. If X is a noun phrase, then all that means is that after 700 years, because has gained a bit more functionality as a preposition, and like before and after, can now take both clausal and noun phrase complements. When you look at it that way, it’s no more exciting than the fact that people now say graduated college as well as graduated from college. Either way, graduate is still a verb.
So yes, because is a preposition, but not on account of this new usage. But there’s still the question of exactly what kind of complement this particular prepositional flavor of because takes. In her most recent blog post on this topic, Gretchen McCulloch grapples with the variety of, and restrictions on, X in because X. Her generalization is that whether it’s a bare noun, a full noun phrase, an adjective, a verb, or an interjection, the X component has to be able to stand alone as an utterance. Interjections can certainly do this: Yay! Duh! So can some noun and adjective phrases: No school! Awesome! So can some verbs: Want! But not all nouns, adjectives, and verbs can stand alone, and those that can’t are not compatible with because X. For example, McCulloch points out that «because want» is common, but «because desire» is not.
As for the meaning of because X, many of the commenters on the blog posts have stated that people who use it are being humorous or cynical: The idea is that these speakers are taking on the point of view of someone so excited, distracted, stupid, or inarticulate that they can’t be bothered to explain their reasons in full. This is true, especially in some of the earlier examples of because X, which take the form because, hey, X, or because, y’know, X, noted in 2011 by John Baker on the American Dialect Society’s email list.The hey or y’know signals the speaker’s difficulty in articulating the full thought.
However, the freshest examples of because X don’t fit McCulloch’s rule that X can stand alone, and they’re not used ironically. In my piece for Grammar Girl, I began with quotations from an article in Slate, in which young children explained their choices for their favorite Pixar movies. As I wrote there:
A five-year-old chose Toy Story 2, «Because Evil Emperor Zurg!» A four-year-old liked Monster Inc. «Because the day care.» A six-year-old chose Monsters University, «because the part where Sully has the big roar and scares all the policemen.»
«Because the part where Sully has the big roar and scares all the policemen» — a straightforward and articulate reason, expressed in a complex noun phrase that can’t stand alone as a complete thought. To quote myself again, I offered this explanation:
As for the transition from the sarcastic usage to the sarcasm-free usage by younger speakers, we know that irony goes right over kids’ heads. As they’re learning the language as toddlers, they hear «Because NOUN» and just put it in with all the other grammar they’re learning.
So in the future, we might have not just one new use of because as a preposition, but two: the exclamatory because X, where X can be anything uttered with feeling, and the more pedestrian because X, where X is a noun phrase (or maybe an adjective phrase). This version of because will mean the same thing as because of, and might well come to replace it, because shorter.
Neal Whitman blogs at Literal-Minded, where he writes about linguistics in everyday life from the point of view of a husband and father. He taught English as a second language while earning his degree at Ohio State University; has published articles in Language, Journal of Linguistics, and other publications; and writes occasional scripts for the podcast «Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.»
Click here to read more articles by Neal Whitman.
HILTON MINNEAPOLIS—JAN. 3— In its 24th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “because” as the Word of the Year for 2013. The selection recognized that because is now being used in new ways to introduce a noun, adjective, or other part of speech.
Presiding at the Jan. 3 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. Zimmer is also the language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
“This past year, the very old word because exploded with new grammatical possibilities in informal online use,” Zimmer said. “No longer does because have to be followed by of or a full clause. Now one often sees tersely worded rationales like ‘because science’ or ‘because reasons.’ You might not go to a party ‘because tired.’ As one supporter put it, because should be Word of the Year ‘because useful!’”
Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.
The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion.
Members in the 125-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.
In a companion vote, sibling organization the American Name Society voted “Francis” as Name of the Year for 2013 in its tenth annual name-of-the-year contest, to commemorate the ascendancy of Pope Francis.
AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY VOTE TALLIES
The number after each nomination is the number of votes it received. Winners are indicated by an asterisk, and numbers separated by slash marks indicate a run-off. Voting totals for each category might not be identical because the number of voters might have changed for each category.
WORD OF THE YEAR
* because: introducing a noun, adjective, or other part of speech (e.g., “because reasons,” “because awesome”). 127
slash: used as a coordinating conjunction to mean “and/or” (e.g., “come and visit slash stay”) or “so” (“I love that place, slash can we go there?”). 21
twerk: A mode of dance that involves vigorous booty-shaking and booty-thrusting, usually with the feet planted. 7
Obamacare: term for the Affordable Care Act that has moved from pejorative to matter-of-fact shorthand. 39
selfie: a photo taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone and shared on social media. 20
MOST USEFUL
* because: introducing a noun, adjective, or other part of speech (e.g., “because reasons,” “because awesome”). 64/117
slash: used as a coordinating conjunction to mean “and/or” (e.g., “come and visit slash stay”) or “so” (“I love that place, slash can we go there?”). 51/79
selfie: a photo taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone and shared on social media. 37
strug(gle) bus: metaphor for a difficult situation, as in “I’m riding the struggle bus.” Also a verb. 32
ACC: “aggressive carbon-copy,” used to undermine the position of the recipient of an email, such as cc’ing the boss or legal counsel.
MOST CREATIVE
* catfish: to misrepresent oneself online, especially as part of a romantic deception. 62/94
doge: an Internet meme with intentionally ungrammatical exclamations over an image of a dog (typically the Shiba Inu breed). 70/88
bitcoin: an anonymous, decentralized, digital, encrypted currency and payment system. 4
robo sapiens: a class of robots with human-like intelligence. 51
MOST UNNECESSARY
* sharknado: a tornado full of sharks, as featured in the Syfy Channel movie of that name. 162
cronut: a croissant-doughnut hybrid. 18
stack-ranking: a method of ranking employees on a primitive curve (used and abandoned by Microsoft). 11
MOST OUTRAGEOUS
* underbutt: the underside of buttocks, made visible by certain shorts or underwear. 54/110
revenge porn: vindictive posting of sexually explicit pictures of someone without consent. 46/75
fatberg: large deposit of fat, grease, and solid sewage found in London sewers. 26
s(c)hmeat: (blend of sheet + meat): meat product grown in a lab. 17
thigh gap: a space between the thighs, taken by some as a sign of attractiveness (also box gap). 43
MOST EUPHEMISTIC
* least untruthful: involving the smallest necessary lie (used by intelligence director James Clapper). 121
demised: laid off from employment (used by the bank HSBC). 16
slimdown: reinterpretation of “shutdown” used on Fox News site. 72
MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
* binge-watch: to consume vast quantities of a single show or series of visual entertainment in one sitting. 117
drone: (trans. verb) to target with a drone, typically in a lethal drone strike. 19
glasshole: a person made oblivious by wearing Google Glass, a head-mounted computer. 21
Obamacare: term for the Affordable Care Act that has moved from pejorative to matter-of-fact shorthand. 51
LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
* Thanksgivukkah: confluence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah that will not be repeated for another 70,000 years. 159
birthmas: a simultaneous celebration of a birthday and Christmas. 19
Harlem Shake: a video meme featuring comic, convulsive dancing accompanied by excerpt of the song “Harlem Shake” by the DJ Baauer. 19
MOST PRODUCTIVE (new category)
* -shaming: (from slut-shaming) type of public humiliation (fat-shaming, pet-shaming). 98/132
-splaining: (from mansplaining) type of condescending explanation (whitesplaining, journosplaining). 49/68
–coin: (from bitcoin) type of cryptocurrency (peercoin, namecoin, dogecoin). 0
-(el)fie: (from selfie) type of self-portrait (drelfie ‘drunk selfie,’ twofie ‘selfie with two people’). 39
-hack: (from lifehack) type of shortcut to increase productivity. 13
-spo: (from thinspo) type of photo or video montage intended to inspire viewers to lose weight or stay fit (fitspo, sportspo). 1
# # #
Read or download the entire press release in PDF form.
All previous years’ winners are here.
Tagged word of the year, words of the year, woty
Here’s a fun bit of news. In Minneapolis last night the American Dialect Society (ADS) declared because its Word of the Year 2013. Going up against topical heavyweights like selfie, Bitcoin, Obamacare, and twerk, the humble conjunction-turned-maybe-preposition proved a surprising and emphatic winner with 127 votes.
Well, surprising to some – in a post I wrote for Macmillan Dictionary Blog before Christmas, I named because X my word/phrase of the year. I didn’t dwell on it because I’ve already written about it at length, in ‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar, where I described it as a “succinct and expressive” innovation.
That post on because X (the title of which I regret) ended up getting quite a lot of attention, thanks in part to Megan Garber’s follow-up for the Atlantic, which spread to various other news and aggregator sites. It also stoked considerable debate because even linguists disagree about because‘s grammatical identity in the construction.
It’s sometimes called because NOUN, but I avoid this because it also licenses verbs, adjectives, and interjections; see my earlier post for examples. As Ben Zimmer put it, 2013 saw because “[explode] with new grammatical possibilities in informal online use”, while his Word Routes report says it’s “fitting that a bunch of language scholars would celebrate such a linguistically innovative form”.
The American Dialect Society’s WOTY event is the biggie for language nerds, not least because it has a range of interesting categories. A couple of days ago I emailed the ADS with my nominations, which I then posted on Twitter:
…selfie (most likely to succeed), catfish (least likely to succeed), least untruthful (euphemistic), because X (overall WOTY) [2/2] #woty13
— Stan Carey (@StanCarey) January 2, 2014
A new category this year was Most Productive, which was dominated by affixes and libfixes like –splaining and –shaming. I was glad least untruthful won Most Euphemistic, and disappointed that catfish trumped doge for Most Creative. See the ADS press release for all the nominations and vote counts, and Ben Zimmer’s post for commentary.
Because also won Most Useful, closely beating slash in the latter’s new guise as a coordinating conjunction. I wrote briefly and approvingly about this use of slash last year, and I’d like to have seen the honours shared. But impossible, because temporal asymmetry, so whatever. If this slash keeps spreading, though, its day slash night will come.
I’ll be returning to the subject of ungrammatical wordplay memes – why they appeal, what motivates them, and so on – in a later post. Because such fascinate, and very language.
Update 1:
I’ve been waiting for someone to analyse the grammar of because X, because there’s a lot of uncertainty over whether it’s acting as a preposition, and I’m not qualified to adjudicate. Also, in my earlier post on because X I noted that it wasn’t just because behaving this way: so, also, but, thus et al. were doing so too.
Now, at All Things Linguistic, Gretchen McCulloch has posted a very helpful deconstruction of the construction [and see the comments on her post for discussion]: Why the new “because” isn’t a preposition (but is actually cooler):
It’s not that because is newly a preposition: depending on your definition, it’s either still not a preposition or it always has been. Instead, it’s that subordinating conjunctions as a class are appearing in a new type of construction, that is, with interjectional complements in addition to the prepositional phrases and clauses that we’ve seen for a long time. Harder to explain maybe, but the data’s very robust and the results are pretty cool.
Interjectional complements doesn’t make for snappy headlines like new preposition does, but that’s immaterial. I find Gretchen’s analysis persuasive, and the discussions she’s had with other linguists (some are linked from her post) suggest a degree of consensus. Competing hypotheses might emerge, but I’m gravitating around this one for now.
Update 2:
At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum takes polite but firm issue with McCulloch’s interpretation, in a post on the promiscuity of prepositions:
[T]he mistake of trusting a standard dictionary definition of “preposition” has misled All Things Linguistic (and even Stan Carey to some extent), just like it misleads everyone else.
Also on this topic, Neal Whitman has a good post at Visual Thesaurus in which he explains why because was awarded WOTY, and how different grammatical schools of thought mean there are different ways of interpreting because X:
So yes, because is a preposition, but not on account of this new usage. But there’s still the question of exactly what kind of complement this particular prepositional flavor of because takes. . . . The freshest examples of because X don’t fit McCulloch’s rule that X can stand alone, and they’re not used ironically.
At the Dictionary.com blog, Jane Solomon summarises reaction to the new construction, ponders its origin and grammar, and wonders what we should call it:
There is currently not any sort of consensus among linguists over the part of speech of this new because, though this might change as the discussion continues. I personally feel that because x is the safest moniker for the time being. As far as the part of speech goes, the grammar classification might further shift as English speakers play with and develop the new uses of because x.
Tyler Schnoebelen at the Idibon blog has done some serious number-crunching on this, analysing twenty-something thousand tweets for patterns of because X (the top X? Yolo). For stats, laughs, and useful academic links, read his post ‘Innovating because innovation.’
More discussion and links at Language Log’s ‘ADS WOTY: “Because”‘; and Language Hat’s ‘Because (Prep).’
Photo of Kabosu by Atsuko Sato, modified because doge.
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Crowning a word of the year is so hot these days. An increasing number of dictionaries and websites each churn out their specimens, trying to encapsulate the zeitgeist—or at least get some good, free PR. But one group was anointing a “WOTY” long before it was cool: the American Dialect Society, a cadre of linguists, lexicographers and other lexically-oriented souls that holds their big annual meeting in the first days of January each year.
A few days ago in Minneapolis, attendees made cases for slash, Obamacare and selfie. Yet the votes ultimately came in for because—not the boring old conjunction because, but a new form that is illustrating language’s ability to keep it fresh. They voted for the because that a headline writer uses when he pens, “The Senate changes its rules, because politics.” Rather than being followed by the traditional of or a whole clause, this because is typically followed by one word, be it noun, verb, adjective or something else. Because nachos. Because want. Because science. It’s punchy, irreverent and such a different kind of usage that linguists don’t even know what to call it. “We may be talking about a new class of words,” says Ben Zimmer, a sociolinguist who presided over the voting.
Requiring a cumbersome explanation is clearly small potatoes next to that kind of innovation when it comes to winning votes among the erudite. “You get a bunch of linguists in a room and say, ‘Hey, look at this old function word that’s being used in brand new ways,’ and that piques their interest,” says Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com. “It has a kind of child-like quality to it as well, that makes it very playful, intentionally tweaking grammar in a way that kids often do.”
Zimmer calls this usage of because “Internet-inspired grammar.” And any Tumblr connoisseur should have been able to guess those origins. Like much Internet speak, this form is based on dropping elements that a listener or reader would traditionally expect. Digital communication, after all, turned thanks into thx into tx into [thumbs up emoji here]. The new because echoes the space constraints of social media and the bare-bones language of hashtags.
There’s also a subversive quality to this because, in how self-consciously one is defying English teachers everywhere. And like most slang or Internet jargon, there is a suggestion of “shared understanding,” as Zimmer puts it, especially when it’s used to mock a political perspective or simple, reductive rationales. Both reader and writer have to be close to the same page, for instance, to understand a Wonkette headline like, “Georgia Governor Nathan Deal won’t endorse black teens and white teens dancing together, because liberals.”
For early adopters, the self-conscious, snarky quality of the new because may already be getting a little tired; the trend came in far from last place in TIME’s word banishment poll this year. But Zimmer notes that if the form really catches on, as it seems to be, self-conscious usage could transition into natural usage: A new generation of Americans could grow up thinking it is perfectly acceptable to explain oneself by saying “Because waffles.” While the cool kids often drop something that becomes too widespread and thus uncool—like slang that your mom is throwing around—the versatility of the new because suggests it may have staying power. Because pretty much anything can go right here.
For those who missed it, here is a roundup of some other major Word-of-the-Year selections:
Oxford Dictionaries: selfie
Merriam-Webster: science
Dictionary.com: privacy
This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a weekly feature on language. For the previous post, click here.