Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice?

i hate that use of "because"

i only like it to watch the spread of adoption

its the worst of thing thats kinda funny as a joke until it becomes a convention then its just dumb and useless and not funny

except i guess it could help on twitter because character limit

hmm i wrote worst when i meant kind interesting because freudian xp

The article is correct in that the new form of 'because' has become widely used and recognized, but it remains to be seen if it has any staying power.

it's insidery shorthand because people like to be part of a crowd that is so in that they use their own shorthand
reading old noise board threads is good for this too, if i'm being honest

people who use "because" like that are monsters

real concision hedz use "ftb"

= "for to because"

afaics, it is merely a truncation of "because of". If it were true that all cases of the new usage would conform to traditional usage by substituting "because of" for "because", then this new use represents a very common sort of progression in American English and I'm guessing it will stick. We Americans love to truncate.

i suspect it will not make the leap from jokey voice to regular voice

because dumb

#dumb

afaics, it is merely a truncation of "because of". If it were true that all cases of the new usage would conform to traditional usage by substituting "because of" for "because", then this new use represents a very common sort of progression in American English and I'm guessing it will stick. We Americans love to truncate.

i disagree, i think it's a much bigger ellipsis than that.
e.g.: "i have to see this because EMOTIONS" is not short for "i have to see this because of emotions" - that's still an incomplete sentence! It's more like "i have to see this because [i have a lot of emotions related to this]/[i anticipate experiencing a lot of emotions]/[i anticipate that this is full of emotions and they are a thing i like to see]"

i.e. it is not the 'because' that is really the focus we should be looking at, it is the way the subsequent word is a distillation of a clause

So you locate the ellipsis you describe in "because" and not also in "EMOTIONS"?

that was an xp

i disagree with aimless's theory too -- it is too casual to be that widely adopted

it'll go away like the vomit in everyone's mouth went away

ha some people still have a lil vomit in their mouths and when you hear about it you feel a little pity because so uncool

so it will be thrown under the bus, you are saying?

when you hear about it you feel a little pity because so uncool
exactly -- only the too late adopters will use it and they will out themselves as deeply uncool

that little bit of vomit shows up on my facebook wall sometimes

and i'm guessing that at least 4/5 times it's a late adopter, if not 100% of the time

as does "best. (x). ever." (which will probably never go away unfortunately)

cataloguing people's language tics is why i can still find facebook useful/amusing
it's like a living corpus of language in use

a cyber corpus

ilx too on a boring day

Hm, I used "because" as a preposition for the second time on ILX ever just a few hours ago (sorry LL)

i only like it to watch the spread of adoption

― sweat pea (La Lechera), Friday, November 22, 2013 1:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, me too, basically.

http://fistintheair.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/childish-gambino-tweet.jpg

oh no

i rest my case

the "because internet" construction doesn't seem like a faux-naif thing to me, at least not in the way that it was discussed in this thread. dayo's observations were otm: this voice at its most characteristic is a response to the writer's awareness of their limitations -- of all the conditioning that comes to bear on their claims, as well as the impossibility of ever really stepping outside all of this stuff to talk "objectively"... the same old derridean impasses they teach every english major -- and it expresses a desire for an "innocent" subject position. culture paradoxically comes to seem alienating when one recognizes it as a "total" system. for these bloggers, becoming a cultural critic is not about their love of culture, but their fear of it. trends, phenomena, etc. need to be kept at arm's length and to do this you need to keep an eye on them. by rendering cultural phenomena visible, one can forget -- for today -- that culture itself permeates everything, has no borders, and is invisible.

people who say "because internet" are evincing a level of knowingness that is the opposite of the faux-naif blog voice. where's the anxiety? people who say this seem to think they can make generalizations about the meanings and origins of things and be correct.

people who say this seem to think they can make generalizations about the meanings and origins of things and be correct.

i think that it's more that they expect their readership to understand just what the ellipsis they are making would have contained - also, not "origins of things" so much as "reasons for things".

bored arrogance

+ insidery

Isn't it mostly a technique for compression needed b/c of character limits for Twitter and texting?

People pick up habits there and apply them to their writing elsewhere, even on ILX iirc.

Isn't it mostly a technique for compression needed b/c of character limits for Twitter and texting?
it's one reason people give, but it's definitely not the only reason people use it (esp the later adopters)

People pick up habits there and apply them to their writing elsewhere, even on ILX iirc.
more specifically, people assimilate, or attempt to

Isn't it mostly a technique for compression needed b/c of character limits for Twitter and texting?

"b/c of" has fewer characters than "because", "bc" would have fewer still.

ll otm itt because sociolinguistics

Thank you

otm

the dfw-lite essay style seems to not be about condensing ideas though, almost the opposite.

would you prefer if there were a separate thread for every syntactic feature of "blog voice"? i'm pretty sure this thread is standing in as a place to put all related data and observations, however tedious it all might be.

i guess not. i think the thread topic is interesting though.

"X because Y" doesn't express anything other than "I read those blogs/threads too" imo, same with shibaspeak, same with vikings, etc etc. The effect varies as like with all memes; sometimes it contributes to community coherence, sometimes it comes across as try-hard, sometimes nobody notices.

i'm ok with people using language this way

it's gonna happen regardless of whether or not we like it; my only point is that it helps to be aware that it is a linguistic manifestation of a socially-motivated urge/desire.

it'll go away like the vomit in everyone's mouth went away

Christ.Yesterday I realised I ended txt message to someone with ...NOT without even thinking and I wanted to kill myself once I realised.

Why don't I just have a cow man and be done with it.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simplest-punctuation-mark-has-become-sign-anger