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Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

What's fascinating to me is that, unlike so many other language "changes", this isn't caused by laziness or carelessness. This seems to be a rare case where removing words adds information, rather than removing it: "The talks failed because of politics" means roughly what it says, while "The talks failed because politics" means roughly "The talks failed because of politics, which is the kind of thing that always happens when politics are involved".

Any linguists care to comment whether there's a term for this kind of meaning compression? "Idiom" doesn't quite seem to cover it.

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I think "idiom" is an apt description. It's a compact phrase that conveys at least two layers of meaning. Most importantly, one of those meanings cannot simply be parsed from the direct syntax & vocabulary that make up the phrase, but relies on the cultural familiarity with the phrase and its common usage.

I do wonder, though, how long this secondary meaning will last. Right now the dismissive connotation comes about because the phrase stands out, because it breaks the rules in order to be overly brief. If the phrase gets used more, and especially as a new generation never grows up not hearing it, it will not stand out anymore as an unconventional. It could just become grammatical. Without that element, it could easily lose its dismissive connotation.

This is kind of exciting to watch, in a nerdy sort of way. Language evolution doesn't really happen much in literate societies like ours, so it's neat that we have an example unfolding before our eyes.

I'm not sure that understanding this is that predicated on cultural familiarity. I'd argue the majority of its meaning comes from the fact that it "breaks the rules in order to be overly brief." The syntax being intentionally wrong, bad, and clumsy coincides with the fact that it's often used to describe absurd things and situations. Clumsy syntax = slightly belligerent rhetoric? I could be wrong, my main idea of a idiom is a proverb or figurative parallel illustrating a concept.

I don't think it's belligerent or simply compressed. AFAICT, it warns the listener that a lot is being left out. It is, in fact, the independent phrase version, using a single noun as the independent phrase. This tells the listener to deduce the rest of the phrase. The verb and object are generally omitted for reasons other than brevity.

"I added bacon to my ice cream because bacon" [is the most awesome thing ever] (and if you don't already know that or don't agree, I don't want to try defending it).

"The project failed because politics" [generally causes everything to fail] (and if I start talking about that I'll start ranting and no one wants that).

"Root beer in a square glass is beer because math" [uses "square" and "root" as opposites] (but if I said that explicitly it would harm the humor of the joke).

Contrast "I added bacon to my ice cream because of bacon", which would suggest that everything you need to know is there and it is the nature of bacon to be added to ice cream.

Off-topic, but just wanted to add that the four comments above exemplify why I still find hope in HN discussions. Each one adds some new insight, refining what was said previously and does it in a constructive way.

There's also ambiguity. I didn't think math was funny just because of the pun, but also because of the way people use math to justify homeopathy. It's mathematical, so it must be true. From a similar cultural perspective, I can see something totally different but also valid.

Most popular memes have cross-cultural appeal, and we each add to them.

Yes, a lack of words are omitted to mock a lack of thought. That's all. Anyone who thinks otherwise just missed the boat.

substitute "internet" for "cultural" in cultural familiarity and I think you'll understand the point better.

This is really just a slightly more grown up version of lolcat. Because cats.

> Language evolution doesn't really happen much in literate societies like ours, so it's neat that we have an example unfolding before our eyes.

I believe that we write more than we ever did. But what we write is not literature but a written form of casual conversation (blog comments, forum posts, IM, IRC, email...). It seems to me that it is likely, on the contrary, to favour a faster evolution of the language; especially for international English.

You probably won't see this reply, but what I meant was...

Change in our language is slowed because we have high exposure to how the language was used decades, or generations, in the past. This exposure 'anchors' our language to a much greater extent than societies that do not have a high rate of written or audio records.

We acquire language in the form that it is used around us. In the absence of records, this means that the last generation's "slang" becomes our "normal speech," and whatever was spoken sixty years back is something we've never heard. This makes for a high rate of linguistic turnover, and four generations of separation will usually result in mutual incomprehensibility.

In modern times, I'm regularly being influenced by English that's 50 years old via Star Trek, Star Wars, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Silver Surfer comic books. Because I still have exposure to generations-old versions of English, my speech will continue to resemble them.

It depends on the parts of language you're referring to. Pre-1600 in the days before widespread mechanized transport, mass media and printing Britain ended up with a lot of regional dialects and ways of spelling the same words [1] as mutations had to conquer a much smaller population to get a secure foothold.

We see minor evolutions in language these days - an extra word or changed usage to keep the dictionary-writers employed - but is there anything comparable to the differences you'd see across Britain in the 1600s?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_Englis...

I'd call it a grammatical construction. Your brain already knows how to "typecast" a noun to a reason ("Why didn't the bill pass?" "I don't know. Politics."), it's just not usually grammatically "licensed" in this case. If you've been infected by the "because [noun]" meme, however, you have a construction in your vocabulary (we could say in your idiolect) that can be invoked to explain any instances of "because [noun]" you come across, with all the associated connotations you learned along with it.

It's similar to "Suddenly, bananas!" or "I accidentally the whole thing." I wish I could remember all the strange grammar I heard at MIT. Communities like the hacker community and 4chan are fertile ground for new grammatical constructions because people pick up and repeat the ones they hear while trying to preserve their meaning and connotations.

I still occasionally burst out laughing when I hear a funny turn of phrase at Meteor (which has a lot of MIT people).

Funny language is funny.

I just came across a variant in the wild -- a Quora comment -- which puts the noun as the thing to be explained rather than the explanation:

That was the point if the question, though. "If God does not exist, then how come physics?" And the answer is, "You can just leave off the 'God' part and just ask 'how come physics?'"

I wonder why "how come [noun]" is recognizable as sort of the same thing.

idiolect - now there's a word that sums up the language used in most comments on the internet :)

The closest thing I can think of to the removed word is not "of" but the Spanish "hay" (pronounced like "I"), which has no clear English analogue, but it means roughly "there is" or "the present state of affairs includes". The talks failed because hay politics (there is politics), the sandwich is delicious because hay bacon (it has bacon), you should go to the planetarium because hay space (there is [the profundity of our relationship to the cosmos]), where in the last case we also consider the context of the word "space" (nobody would here say "because cosmos!").

My favorite: Putting Root Beer in a square cup makes it regular beer because math.

It took me a few seconds to get my head around that one.

The author of that tweet could have eliminated "beacuse math" entirely.

and you're admitting that on hn! The capital triggered your brain to think of proper nouns, rather than just a plain old noun.

>>"The talks failed because of politics" means roughly what it says, while "The talks failed because politics" means roughly "The talks failed because of politics, which is the kind of thing that always happens when politics are involved"

Well, no. It actually alludes to the fact that politics was the hand-wavy excuse used to describe why the talks failed.

It goes back to "X happened because aliens." As in, we can't explain why it happened, therefore we'll just say it was aliens that did it.

Actually you're both right. (and you're therefore both wrong, because contradictions).

The "because ___" construct has the nice effect of making the listener associate multiple connotations of the ___ word. So in the case of politics, it means "handwavy politics without explanation" and "because this is always the excuse" and "politics fucks everything up" and all the other things you associate with the term. Similary because aliens invokes what you said, since we know that aliens are just a lazy excuse commonly used, and also they are basically magical beings (in common vernacular) so anything can be attributed to them (like fairies).

Interesting, we seem to be reading it differently. I don't think there's any real basis to say one reading is more valid than the other.

The way I read the construct, which the article touches on, is as shorthand to refer to universal properties of a subject that both the writer and the reader understand. "Because politics" = "because politics usually results in stupid outcomes", "because bacon" = "because bacon is delicious and should be in everything", "because racecar" = "because racecars throw out the rules of what you would expect in a regular car", etc. Used this way it becomes self-referrential as an obvious explanation - "of course talks failed, politics was involved". "Of course I put bacon, bacon is delicious". "Of course there's no interior, it's a race car".

Of course, different people may read different implied properties based on their own views, that may not be the same as what the writer had in mind...

I think it acknowledges a failure in explanation -- you start with, "The talks failed because...", but there is no easy reason why the talks failed. So you just put a word in there. "Politics." It's an aborted attempt at explanation. It implies extensive context and a truly complex or even incomprehensible explanation.

The grammatical failure is the kind that would happen in speech, when the speaker suddenly realizes he's bit off more than he can chew, and truncates his explanation with a pause, a word, a shrug, and a rueful smile. "because, you know... politics."

> this isn't caused by laziness or carelessness

Some of this might be caused by increased use of smartphones for posting on the Facebook, tweeting, and texting. I'm not sure laziness is the right word, but conservation of characters is certainly a goal.

As far as laziness, I'll disagree with you. Hardly ever is a "because X" clause well thought out or witty. I think it's safe to assume there is some serious mental laziness happening when you see a "prepositional because" being used.

Interesting that "mental laziness" is the association you have with this construction. It certainly signals a sort of casual tone, but it's easy to fall into the trap of "different than the way I speak" -> "wrong". Certainly not helped by the fact that young people are the ones who generate and adopt language changes at a vastly higher rate.

"Laziness" in language change generally follows the principle of least effort - both in syntax changes as well as phonetic and phonological changes. We're almost certainly beginning to see more sweeping effects of shortened communication media on English, beyond the near-ubiquitous acronyms now in use.

I have nothing against brevity. And I don't think it's lazy because I don't speak that way.

To clarify my thoughts, I think it's one thing to use a prepositional because when referring to oneself. However, it's another thing to criticize someone else with a five syllable simplification. It's impossible to do justice to someone else's thoughts and feelings that way. That lack of understanding and empathy is what I find to be lazy.

Now, a full-length column in the New York Times or a bit on Fox News certainly is not necessarily a fair and coherent argument. But, leaving room for exceptions, pithy "because X" clauses are not fair to third-party subjects.

I think we are in agreement then. I certainly wouldn't use a construction like this in a serious critique. But then there are thousands of other things I wouldn't write or say in a serious context either.

> Some of this might be caused by increased use of smartphones

I actually find it more effort to type full English sentences with a keyboard and mouse; my Android smartphone has voice dictation and swipe gesture typing, and I find that iOS' autocorrect appears to trigger most when you type something that isn't a "standard" sentence.

> This seems to be a rare case where removing words adds information

Words aren't being removed, but the word because is being added to a very old speech pattern.

"The talks failed because politics" is an expansion of "The talks failed: politics", with a pause between failed and politics, and politics spoken like a new one-word sentence, usually at a slightly different pitch level than The talks failed. It's meaning and intonation pattern is quite different to "The talks failed because of politics".

When saying "The talks failed because politics" out loud, we still put a pause before politics, and use the same intonation pattern as "The talks failed: politics". The word because replaces the terser colon in the written form.

It could also be interpreted as a short form of: "The talks failed because politics happened". Now we're just dropping the obvious verb at the end, because obvious is obvious.

The added inference I get is "that's just the way it is."

"Because politics" is like saying "because politics are just crazy like that."

It's a flippant way of saying something is simply absurd. Or an issue is pretty much binary.

Yeah, it has an "do you even have to ask?" flavor to it for me.

amazingly, something similar can be observed in Russian language as well. In casual speech, one can explain the reason for something using потому что (because) followed by a noun (e.g. "потому что политика! - "because politics!"), followed by end of sentence. Which I'm not entirely sure is grammatically correct, however it has an effect similar to what you mentioned.

I don't think that's grammatically correct, yeah. The correct version would most likely be "из-за политики", though that's just a bit of a weird thing to say just like that.

Somewhat related to the concept of "deixis" or "indexicality" - phrases whose meaning can vary depending on contextual information. "Because politics" could mean one thing in a dysfunctional country, and entirely another in an extremely well-run one.

Not a linguist, but wouldn't this fall under "pithiness"? I think generic brevity and succinctness would also describe this adequately.

a term for this kind of meaning compression?

Because Katz.

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