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English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
131–140 of 162 posts
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
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] (…
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.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#133I'm not yet convinced that this is something one can use and not get laughed at for quite yet. It's fine for informal communications because your readers are probably not too literate, but I fear that this might still confuse an older generation used to more formal grammatical constructions. All of the examples are just social media wanking, as far as I can tell, so probably not indicative of any actual shift in how…
> [..] an older generation used to more formal grammatical constructions. They didn't start out as formal constructions, just pick up any lament about the decline of language from, say, the 19th century.
My favourite "decline of language" issue, because it still riles up certain people while it seems clear that the accepted usage will inevitably change, is "begs the question".
As a non-native English speaker, I had never even seen or heard the "correct" usage until I saw people complaining about the horrors of the decline of language caused by people using it synonymous with "raises the question". The only reason I've seen the "correct" usage now is because people complaining about the change occasionally points it out.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#134It's not really a new preposition, per se. It's a type of joke. Every occurrence cited here is using it in a jokey fashion. It seems to me you may as well say potatoes are a common topic of conversation on the Internet because of Latvian jokes.
> It seems to me you may as well say potatoes are a common topic of conversation on the Internet because of Latvian jokes.
Potatoes are a common talk topic on the net because, like, Latvian jokes.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#135Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means sleep was the cause of lunch being missed. No more details are provided or implied. Off the record, one could guess that the speaker didn't want to remark on oversleeping due to the negative connotations, and is instead leaving the answer vague in the hopes of don't-ask-don't-tell. Depending on the audience, this may also be exactly enough information to be unambiguous with the fewest number of words; a frie…
How are you pulling original data out of a lossy compression method?
How do you interpret any spoken or written sentence? It is all lossy.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#137What'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 happ…
> 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.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#138It's not really a new preposition, per se. It's a type of joke. Every occurrence cited here is using it in a jokey fashion. It seems to me you may as well say potatoes are a common topic of conversation on the Internet because of Latvian jokes.
This is how the word "OK" started out; it was a joke abbreviation of "all correct": Oll Korrect. You never know when a joke is going to take over the world... [0] http://www.amazon.com/OK-Improbable-Story-Americas-Greatest/...
There are many other hypotheses about where the word OK comes from.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#139What'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 happ…
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…
> 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.
Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
#140What'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 happ…
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…
idiolect - now there's a word that sums up the language used in most comments on the internet :)