Where “because noun” probably came from

There’s been a flurry of new articles recently on the “because noun” construction, many of which quote a post I made over a year ago. I have some new thoughts since then, including a different hypothesis about where the “because noun” constructions come from than the other articles, but first some quotes. Because context. From The Atlantic: 

You probably know it better, however, as explanation by way of Internet—explanation that maximizes efficiency and irony in equal measure. I’m late because YouTube. You’re reading this because procrastination.

Stan Carey gives lots of examples from twitter, noting that: 

Bare nouns certainly seem more common in the X slot, and tend to carry more emphasis, but I’ve seen longer noun phrases, and other classes of words, used too; there are examples below.

The construction is more versatile than “because+noun” suggests. Prepositional because can be yoked to verbs (Can’t talk now because cooking), adjectives (making up examples because lazy), interjections (Because yay!), and maybe adverbs too, though in strings like Because honestly., the adverb is functioning more as an exclamation. The resulting phrases are all similarly succinct and expressive.

Neal Whitman on Grammar Girl suggests that what he calls prepositional “because” originated as a shortening of “because, hey…” as in the following jokes: 

If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you’ll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.

If life gives you lemons, keep them, because, hey, free lemons. 

Before the “hey,” we have a regular English sentence. After the “hey,” we have an extremely condensed and abbreviated thought, represented by just a noun phrase. […]

Somewhere along the way, some speakers began to leave out the “hey,” but managed to keep the hand-waving you-know-what-I-mean overtones for the noun phrase they put after “because.”

I’m skeptical about Neal’s “because, hey” explanation, because as I noted last year, we don’t see a lot of instances of “because noun” with any sort of additional modifier: the most canonical instances of “because noun” are with a bare noun, not a noun phrase. So, “my mouth is sore because lemons” sounds fine to me, but “my mouth is sore because free lemons” sounds a bit more marginal. Not totally unacceptable, maybe, but not the core upon which “because noun” was founded. (Stan Carey’s examples have only 4/19 with more than a single word after “because”.)

In contrast, the modifier is crucial to the humour of the “because, hey” expression, and “because, hey” just doesn’t work in all the contexts where we find “because noun”. For example, something like “If life gives you lemons, keep them, because, hey, lemons” only works if the person you’re talking to already knows the joke or sees the value in lemons. And the example above, “my mouth is sore because, hey, lemons”, is just plain weird. The “hey” implies that the lemons are good, but the previous part of the sentence is saying that the lemons are bad, so I’m really not sure what someone could mean by saying this.  

I think a better explanation comes from an evolution of the meme “because of reasons”, which is derived from the final panel of Three Word Phrase comic #139, which Internet Archive says is from July 2011: 

The final panel of this comic and the phrase “I want this because of reasons” became popular on its own to refer to a wide variety of desirable things, which we can see from searches on google images or tumblr. 

Then, the phrase “I want this because of reasons” became shortened to “because of reasons” which could have been the source of “because reasons”. I definitely remember “because reasons” one of the earliest widespread uses of the “because noun” construction, and a commenter also points out the parallels last year. Neal Whitman dates a more limited use of “because noun” to as early as 2008, but I don’t think it was widespread until around 2011, which coincides fairly well with the publication date of the comic.

One tantalizing source of evidence for the origins of “because noun” is Google Trends: a search for “because of reasons” and “because reasons” shows the of-less form appearing later, as expected. Interestingly, however, “because race car”, appears earlier although it’s less popular. 

Note that “because race car” is not a meme that I’d ever heard of, and I’m normally quite plugged into these things, so I asked eight other People Who Normally Know These Things and they were all very familiar with “I want this because of reasons” but had never heard of “because race car” (or had first seen it in one of the posts above). “Because race car” may have popularized the “because noun” construction a bit, but it didn’t do so very much. 

It’s also important to add the caveat that Google Trends doesn’t show the frequency of a term itself, but rather the frequency of searches for that term, so it can only be evidence for when and how much people searched for a term, and these aren’t necessarily the same as when and how much they used it. And searching for “because NOUN”, either in Google Trends or in a corpus, requires manual annotation because there are so many results with full phrases like “because lemons are great”. (My email corpus was also unhelpful here.)

Survey: had you heard of the “because race car” meme before? Had you heard of “I want this because of reasons” before? If you can find/share examples from your own email corpus of any “because noun” constructions, that would also be interesting! 

For related posts, see also my tag internetese / language on the interwebz.