English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet.

BowlOfRed said:
Grammar Girl did a piece on this recently (actually written by Neal Whitman). I'm not "hip" enough to have heard it much, but it does seem to be a different usage than someone just dropping the "of".

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/because-as-a-preposition
Click to expand...

lolz. I used this very thing yesterday on this very website when I wrote "because: Racism."

i.e. people objected to my mention of Obama's bizarre comment on the taryvon martin killing "because racism."
 
Wasn't this more famously used by Alec Baldwin in Glenn Gerry Glenn Ross? Am I confusing movies?

"Because **** you!"
 
I'm sorry, is this seriously a common usage? Until I saw this story I had NEVER seen anyone use the construct "because noun".
 
Monketey Ghost said:
With you, I kinda like it.
I used to be a crank about the English language but now recognize and appreciate its malleability.
Click to expand...
.
I love that!
The precision of use in say, German, demands all those long throat-clearing words to describe anything.
We can use "pot" in any number of ways, all of which are interpretable by the context.
I can imagine the 14 different terms German would need to do the same thing. :)
"smoke this pot."
"the pot is boiling"
"the economy has gone to pot"
"I took a pot shot"
...
 
I Ratant said:
.
I love that!
The precision of use in say, German, demands all those long throat-clearing words to describe anything.
We can use "pot" in any number of ways, all of which are interpretable by the context.
I can imagine the 14 different terms German would need to do the same thing. :)
"smoke this pot."
"the pot is boiling"
"the economy has gone to pot"
"I took a pot shot"
...
Click to expand...

My position changed after an argument with a friend who insisted that the *nookyaler* pronunciation of the word nuclear would inevitably appear in dictionaries.
As long as a majority of people understand what is being conveyed, it works.
I just have to deal with what I previously insisted was an unacceptable corruption.
 
"Why? Because **** you is why." would be grammatically correct then? Awesome.

NSFW language:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/acz2t/let_me_tell_you_about_demons_souls/

I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because **** you is why.
Click to expand...
 
I am reminded of Churchill's statement when he read a memo in which somebody tried to prove how intellectual they were by playing games with English Grammar:

"I will not up with this nonsense Put".
 
When I saw the title, my first thought was about prepositional use of "re" to mean "about" or "on the subject of", coming from "re:" which originally was an abbreviation for "regarding" or "reply" in email subject lines. I've seen it used as a word in sentences online. The fad seems to be fading now. (Hey... fad... fade... connection?)

But the use of "because" that this thread is really re is not at all new. We occasionally did it when I was a kid for as long as I can remember, so at least as far back as the 1980s.
 
Last edited:
I like development. Good change. I also think linking verbs bad. Ideas recognizable because context. Not sure determinators conjunctions good bad. Many speech parts superfluous.
 
Checkmite said:
I'm a bit puzzled as to why this is offered as an example of "because" being a new preposition.

...with the "of" left off; the message remains the same, so it doesn't make sense to me to assert that the sentence is mechanically different by virtue of the missing word.
Click to expand...
Removing a word but not changing the sentence's meaning means that the remaining words must have slightly different functions, unless one of the words was orange useless in the first place. One way for that to happen (actually the only way I can name at the moment) is for part of a phrase to take over the function that was originally served by a whole phrase.

In this case, the original sentence's phrase "because of" was acting together as one compound word (an "open" compound, like "ice cream"), and that compound word was a preposition. For the sentence to still work the same after the change means that what was left in the compound's position ("because" alone) must still have been a preposition. It's like removing the "to" from a sentence using the phrase "according to". There might be no particular reason why "according" can't be used like that, but it does just mean that "according" then ends up doing the job of "according to".

malicus said:
I remember when I first heard on American tv "I'll write you". Yuk.
Click to expand...
BowlOfRed said:
Does "I'll call you" have the same problem, or is that different?
Click to expand...
The two verbs do usually handle their objects differently. Your quote with "write" has it handling an indirect object in the way "call" handles a direct one... either that or it turns "you" into a direct object, which it usually isn't for "write". So whichever kind of change you figure it is, it isn't the usual way "write" would work.

Morrigan said:
"Why? Because **** you is why." would be grammatically correct then? Awesome.
Click to expand...
The incorrectness is deliberate: self-interruption to emphasize the interrupting part over the interrupted one.
 
"I'll write you" would have been the original formulation, before English dropped the distinguishing cases for "you."
For example, in German, "I'll write to you" is "Ich schreibe dir", which literally translated would be "I write (to) you" with the future being implied. The "dir" is the dative case as opposed to the nominative "du". So the dir indicates that the writing is being done "to" the "you."
I'm pretty sure that English can work this way too, so I disagree that "I'll write you" is somehow idiomatic or a new development. It's just that in "I'll write you" we use the same "you" as in the nominative case, but it still actually means "to you".
 
Last edited:
joesixpack said:
Wasn't this more famously used by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross? Am I confusing movies?

"Because **** you!"
Click to expand...

I don't think that was a reason, I think it was the character's name.

"Who am I? My name is **** you"

................
Monketey Ghost said:
My position changed after an argument with a friend who insisted that the *nookyaler* pronunciation of the word nuclear would inevitably appear in dictionaries.
As long as a majority of people understand what is being conveyed, it works.
I just have to deal with what I previously insisted was an unacceptable corruption.
Click to expand...

But how well will you handle it when the spelling of the word is changed to match the nook-u-lar pronunciation?
 
Last edited:
dudalb said:
I am reminded of Churchill's statement when he read a memo in which somebody tried to prove how intellectual they were by playing games with English Grammar:

"I will not up with this nonsense Put".
Click to expand...

No, that's wrong. Churchill was reacting to the "rule" that says you shouldn't finish a sentence with a preposition. If he'd said "I will not put up with this nonsense" nobody at all would have complained about the sentence.

What he was avoiding was finishing a sentence with the word "with". So he actually said "That is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put", thus demonstrating that saying "That is the kind of nonsense I will not put up with" ought to be perfectly acceptable, as the alternative is too cumbersome.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom