A trivium from the Web: because kidding?

[Laurence Horn]

Probably not mockery; that's our Word of the Year you're talking, because duh
(http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/because-wins-2013-word-of-the-year-vote-because-awesome/)

This very day two students in our Grammatical Diversity in  U.S. English class presented on "Because X", its history, distribution, syntactic constraints, etc. etc.  More complicated than it seems!
(One hypothesis is that its rise may have been influenced by "because YOLO", which was originally understood as 'because you only live once', then when the acronym "YOLO" became just plain "yolo", "because" was reanalyzed to be able to take other nouns, adjectives, etc. as complements.  A possibility, anyway. There are others out there.)

LH



On Apr 17, 2014, at 10:13 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> "If you don't want to have that done, because, you know, reasons, then ..."
> I'm pretty sure that the writer meant this as mockery, but,
>
> Youneverknow
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org