If the title of this post made perfect sense to you, then you’re way ahead of me. But just in case, we’d best recap. Neal Whitman wrote a good article at Grammar Girl recently on the possible origins of because as a standalone preposition. This helpful passage from Whitman sets out the context: 
 
 In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to form what’s called a compound preposition. For example, “Aardvark was late because of heavy traffic.” In the past three or four years, though, a new usage for “because” has been developing. 
 
 The new usage – older than 3–4 years, mind – is what Laura Bailey and Mark Liberman, respectively, have referred to as “because+noun” and “because NOUN”. Liberman says the idiom usually seems to imply “that the referenced line of reasoning is weak”. Sometimes, yes, but it’s also commonly used just for convenience, or effect: No work tomorrow because holidays!; Of course evolution is true, because science. 
 
 Because X is fashionably slangy at the moment, diffusing rapidly across communities. It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone. Because time-strapped. Maybe the causal factor is so obvious as to need no elaboration, or the speaker is distracted or giddy, or online and eager to save effort and move on, or maybe the construction appeals for undefined aesthetic or social reasons. 
 
 Gretchen McCulloch, at All Things Linguistic, points out that there seem to be restrictions on what kind of noun phrases can occur here. Providing examples of what works and doesn’t work for her (e.g., Yes to: I can’t come out tonight because homework/essays; No to: I can’t come out tonight because lots of homework/this essay), she concludes: 
 
 it seems like the because+noun construction really must consist of a bare noun, not a noun with a determiner or an adjective. However, I think I might be able to be okay with: ? I can never get to bed at a reasonable hour because interesting people on the internet! 
 
 With new usages, as with old ones, what works or doesn’t varies from person to person. 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. This 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. 
 
 Here are some examples from Twitter, categorised by grammatical class: 
 
 Nouns, noun phrases, proper nouns: 
 
 Dow closes at record high for 35th time this year because Obama pic.twitter.com/XKDwq67K5D — The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) November 11, 2013 
 
 Swear I can't be the only one who really doesn't give a shit about the color of m&m's and just eats them by the mouthful because chocolate. — nate13X (@Nate_Fair) November 12, 2013 
 
 School because studying. Studying because school. — Andre Perrard (@AndreTAMU15) November 12, 2013 
 
 What if Chris is trolling again and actually is going to be the doctor but has to say he isn't because secret reasons? — Aimee (@_planet_kid) March 24, 2013 
 
 rewatching teen wolf because feels — lauren (@krejface) November 11, 2013 
 
 (Feels in the last tweet is a popular slang abbreviation of feelings, especially in the sense of strong or overwhelming emotion.) 
 
 Verbs: 
 
 Bye going to study for English because didn't finish this morning because fell asleep — I LOVE YOU JUSTIN ! (@charminrauhl) November 10, 2013 
 
 stomach ache because laughing lol — styles (@reverd1d) November 12, 2013 
 
 Hot cocoa because need. — Jo West (@JoWesterhof) November 12, 2013 
 
 Would a perfume ban violate the First Amendment? Is that expression? Because want. — Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) November 7, 2013 
 
 Those moments when you choose to eat a salad not because you want salad… but because want croutons. — Rebekah Loper (@RebekahLoper) November 7, 2013 
 
 Adjectives: 
 
 Going to bed way early because exhausted:/ — Morgan♡ (@_mo_mo37) November 7, 2013 
 
 PREDICTION: Zach Edwards will be ESPN's impact player against Rutgers next week because random. — Cincy on the Prowl (@CincyOnTheProwl) November 9, 2013 
 
 {Falls on her bed and cuddles pillows because tired} — Devanhi Evergrace (@MirkwoodsMuse) November 13, 2013 
 
 A lot of people should really start thinking before they talk because stupid. — Clayton Collins (@ClaytonJCollins) August 16, 2013 
 
 Interjections: 
 
 I need to talk to my cousin too. because oooh ! — kimani . ✌♥ (@CaylaKx3) November 12, 2013 
 
 That feeling you get when you finish an essay and you just want to cry because yay — Alexis Isaacson (@AlexisIsaacson) November 12, 2013 
 
 I might suggest taking @KameronHurley's suggestion and talking about stuff you like today using the hashtag #thingsilike. Because YAY THINGS — Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) September 10, 2013 
 
 Admittedly, not in the UK yet, because aargh. — Richard Cobbett (@richardcobbett) June 10, 2013 
 
 Uhmmm I wish my friend would of told me about windows down sooner because #woohoo — I Love you Connor (@JessupFan) August 26, 2012 
 
 * 
 
 On Language Log I left a comment (before I’d checked) suggesting the usage could’ve come from the “because race car” meme of 2011. But corpus searches show examples from years before that. GloWbE has loads, with many of the noun phrases recurring – science, math, people, art, reasons, comedy, bacon, ineptitude, fun, patriarchy, politics, school, intersectionality, and winner all show up at least twice in the X slot. 
 
 Scanning COHA and COCA for similar constructions, I found examples from ABC’s This Week, 2012: “I’m supporting the Patriots because Patriots.”; CNN’s Larry King Show, 2001: “And of course, that was last thing in the world she would do because publicity.” (though the omission of a definite article makes me wonder if it was poorly transcribed); and NBC’s Dateline, 2005: 
 
 I definitely kind of viewed him as a suspect. Why? Well, because motive. 
 
 Fox News Sunday, 15 years ago, has: “And Primary Colors I think has hit the country like a dud, because behavior. It’s not inspiring.” But I’m not sure: it may be more like “because behaviour, it’s not inspiring”, where the noun is fronted and the grammar, though loose, doesn’t use the prepositional because we’re looking at. Ditto this from Ebony, 2007: “People die of heart attacks and strokes because diabetes. It is one of the more underlisted causes of death…” 
 
 Written examples of prepositional because aren’t rare, but they’re pretty much unheard of in edited text, except where it’s reported speech. COCA offers the following, from the Roeper Review, 1996: “But motivation alone does not assure success: ‘Because circumstances. I was just lucky, really…’” 
 
 There’s also an old and standard construction that’s superficially very similar to prepositional because. The last time I remember seeing it was in Final Cut, Steven Bach’s book on the making of Heaven’s Gate: 
 
 It was pointed out that there seemed to be plenty of time for endless reexamination of footage or for monomaniacal reworking of technical processes, but those all were justified in the name of Art, while seeing how the picture played before an audience was both pointless, because Cimino knew how it would play, and ignoble because a question of mere Commerce. 
 
 It’s different, though, because elliptical. Bach’s “ignoble because a question…” is a grammatical elision of “ignoble because it was a question…”. Our non-standard idiom, by contrast, isn’t eliding particular words – it’s substituting for a whole, possibly vague, train of thought, and could take the form “because Commerce(!)”. Bach’s couldn’t. 
 
 [Analogous examples: “Professor Einstein holds that perception is generally false because relative.” (Time magazine, 1929). “The will to avoid industrial evils was effective, because sincere.” (Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men). “Words that were admitted sparingly because unlimited in number or very numerous.” (Robert Burchfield, Unlocking the English Language).] 
 
 But back to novel because X. Where did it come from? No one is quite sure. Neal Whitman agrees with Language Log commenters who think it could be from “Because hey”–type sentences (If life gives you lemons, keep them, because, hey, free lemons), where hey functions “like an adaptor, letting you shift from the ordinary speech register to this casual and condensed register”. And then people started dropping the hey. 
 
 It’s not always hey, either: take this line from the linguistically trend-setting Buffy, season 5 (January 2001): “I don’t even get how we made that guy, because, wow, advanced!” There may also be forerunners in child–parent exchanges like “Why? That’s the why” and “Why? Because.”; and in the popular insults “Because shut up” and “Because fuck you, that’s why.” 
 
 However it arose, it seems to be spreading. Language loves economy, and the sheer efficiency of this use of because is likely boosting its popularity. Similar constructions are occurring with but, also, so, thus and similar words – see the frame from xkcd, above. And in the Language Log thread (which is worth reading in full), Rod Johnson says a friend “ended a litany of miscellaneous complaints with ‘In conclusion, STUFF.’” All these syntactic compressions may be reinforcing each other. 
 
 I’ve used the construction myself, though not often. On Twitter a year ago I was asked if there’s a “male equivalent of feminist”, and because of the medium’s spatial limitations (and because I was impulsively drawn to the unorthodox syntax) I said: “No precise equivalent, because patriarchy, but ‘masculist’/’masculinist’ is closest. Interpretations of it vary a lot.” 
 
 Is prepositional-because grammatical? Sure. Not in Standard English, of course. But lots of people are using it in a systematic and semantically transparent way. It has obvious appeal in a range of informal contexts, though whether it manages ultimately to insinuate itself into more formally acceptable usage remains to be seen. 
 
 You needn’t use or like this usage of because, and you might even find it annoying, but there’s nothing linguistically problematic about it. Because grammar weirds, because language. 
 
 * 
 
 Updates: 
 
 Following up on this post, Megan Garber at the Atlantic (“English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet”) describes the construction as “exceptionally bloggy and aggressively casual and implicitly ironic. And also highly adaptable.” She notes the significant role of the internet in its development and dissemination, and speculates on its origins. 
 
 Gretchen McCulloch has also returned to it at All Things Linguistic (“Where ‘because noun’ probably came from”), delving further into the grammaticality of different forms of because X and suggesting a different origin story from the because-hey hypothesis. 
 
 There’s more coverage at Neatorama, Daily Dot, CBS News, Boing Boing, and the Russian site Lenta.ru. Coverage elsewhere (Business Insider, Mashable et al.) mostly repeats the Atlantic story, but I’ll add useful links here as they happen.) 
 
 My post’s title may be a bit misleading, and I regret that. I wanted it to include the because X construction, but I ended up sounding too emphatic: because‘s prepositional nature here is not certain. CGEL apparently considers it one even in its traditional roles, but other language commentators disagree. See the comments for discussion. 
 
 On Twitter, Jonathan Lipps offers the example “Unfortunately, [noun phrase]”, and suggests that it’s not so much about because changing as it is the generalisation of “[noun-phrase]-as-elided-clause”. 
 
 Joining the preposition camp is Joe at Mr. Verb, who notes that because originates as a prepositional phrase (by cause), and finds the new usage “has a pretty classic distribution of a preposition […] and the semantics are not weird for a preposition”. He also raises interesting questions from the point of view of historical linguistics. 
 
 Cognitive psychologist Jessica Love has a fascinating post at the American Scholar on the appeal of ungrammatical trends and memes, including “because X”, lolspeak, doge, etc. She writes: 
 
 Many of us—especially younger generations—seem to take special pleasure in wordplay that upends standard grammatical conventions. But why? According to one psychological theory, humor is fundamentally about detecting something that violates our expectations, but in a nonthreatening way. . . . Given grammar’s relatively low stakes, then, it is fodder for immediate humor. 
 
 I left a comment on Jessica’s post, and hope to revisit the subject here before long. 
 
 Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan briefly covers the discussion at The Dish: Because Linguistics. 
 
 Update season 2: 
 
 The American Dialect Society has named because its 2013 Word of the Year (I called it in December) prompting renewed discussion of the word’s precise grammatical role in the because X construction. A very helpful post at All Things Linguistic makes a persuasive case that this novel because “isn’t a preposition (but is actually cooler)“. 
 
 At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum takes polite but firm issue with McCulloch’s interpretation, in a post on the promiscuity of prepositions: “the mistake of trusting a standard dictionary definition of ‘preposition’ has misled All Things Linguistic (and even Stan Carey to some extent), just like it misleads everyone else.” 
 
 Linguist Neal Whitman revisits the grammar of because in both its new and traditional uses, at Visual Thesaurus: “So yes, because is a preposition, but not on account of this new usage. But there’s still the question of exactly what kind of complement this particular prepositional flavor of because takes.” 
 
 Tyler Schnoebelen at the Idibon blog has done some serious number-crunching on this, analysing twenty-something thousand tweets for patterns of because X (the top X? Yolo). For stats, laughs, and useful academic links, read his post ‘Innovating because innovation.’ 
 
 The blog materfamilias reads has drawn my attention to a use of because X from way back in 1949, in Nancy Mitford’s book Love in a Cold Climate: ‘I hadn’t a bit expected that he would come to London for it because for one thing, knee-breeches.’ 
 
 Advertisements ||||| > 
 
 In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to form what’s called a compound preposition. For example, “Aardvark was late because of heavy traffic.” In the past three or four years, though, a new usage for “because” has been developing. 
 
 “Because Evil Emperor Zurg!” 
 
 So what is this new way of using the word “because”? Listen to these quotations from an article in Slate this past summer, in which young children were asked to choose their favorite Pixar movie. A five-year-old chose Toy Story 2, quote, “Because Evil Emperor Zurg!” A four-year-old liked Monster Inc. “Because the day care.” A six-year-old chose Monsters University, “because the part where Sully has the big roar and scares all the policemen.” 
 
 "Because" as a Preposition 
 
 The new usage of “because” treats it as an ordinary preposition, by having it introduce noun phrases instead of clauses or the word “of.” I’ve also heard teenagers say things like, “I’ll do that when school’s out, because more time.” 
 
 This construction got a name just last year. In July 2012, two linguists independently decided to call it “because NOUN.” On July 2, Laura Bailey called it this in a post on her linguistlaura blog, and on July 12, Mark Liberman independently did the same in a Language Log post. 
 
 Buy Now 
 
 But where did this “because NOUN” come from? I have the same suspicion as a few of the commenters on the Language Log post: It has its origins in what I’ll call “because hey” sentences. If you’re old enough, you may remember Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts, a recurring joke on Saturday Night Live. One of them, written in 1987, went like this: 
 
 Pages ||||| News 
 
 Shakespeare’s Plays Reveal His Psychological Signature 
 
 Shakespeare is such a towering literary figure that any new insight into the man, or his work, tends to generate a jolt of excitement in academic and non-academic communities of Shakespeare aficionados. Applying psychological theory and text-analyzing software, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered a unique psychological profile that characterizes Shakespeare’s established works, and this profile strongly identifies Shakespeare as an author of the long-contested play Double Falsehood. 
 
 The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. 
 
 “Research in psychology has shown that some of the core features of who a person is at their deepest level can be revealed based on how they use language. With our new study, we show that you can actually take a lot of this information and put it all together at once to understand an author like Shakespeare rather deeply,” says researcher Ryan Boyd of the University of Texas at Austin. 
 
 The study, conducted in collaboration with James Pennebaker, also at UT-Austin, goes beyond examining authorship from the standpoint of word counts and linguistic regularities, providing a deeper exploration of an author’s psychological profile. 
 
 “This research shows that it is indeed possible to start modeling peoples’ mental worlds in much more complete ways. We don’t need a time machine and a survey form to figure out what type of person Shakespeare was — we can determine that very accurately just based on how he wrote using methods that are objective and easy to do,” Boyd explains. 
 
 Double Falsehood was published in 1728 by Lewis Theobald, who claimed to have based the play on three original Shakespeare manuscripts. The manuscripts have since been lost, presumably destroyed by a library fire, and authorship of the play has been hotly contested ever since. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare was the true author of Double Falsehood, while others believe that the play was actually an original work by Theobald himself that he tried to pass off as an adaptation. 
 
 Boyd and Pennebaker realized that using psychological theory to inform analysis of the playwrights’ respective works may shed light on the authorship question. They examined 33 plays by Shakespeare, 12 by Theobald, and 9 by John Fletcher, a colleague (and sometime collaborator) of Shakespeare. The texts were stripped of extraneous information (such as publication information) and were processed using software that evaluated the works for specific features determined by the researchers. 
 
 For example, the researchers’ software examined the playwrights’ use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles, prepositions) and words belonging to various content categories (e.g., emotions, family, sensory perception, religion). They had the software identify themes present in each of the works to generate an overarching thematic signature for each author. 
 
 They also examined the works to determine how “categorical” the writing was. Categorical writing tends to be heavy on nouns, articles, and prepositions, and it indicates an analytic or formal way of thinking. Research has shown that people who rate high on categorical thinking tend to be emotionally distant, applying problem-solving approaches to everyday situations. People who rate low on categorical thinking, on the other hand, tend to live in the moment and are more focused on social matters. 
 
 By aggregating dozens of psychological features of each playwright, Boyd and Pennebaker were able to create a psychological signature for each individual. They were then able to look at the psychological signature of Double Falsehood to determine who the author was most likely to be. 
 
 Looking at the plays as whole units, the results were clear: Every measure but one identified Shakespeare as the likely author of Double Falsehood. Theobald was identified as the best match only when it came to his use of content words, and even then only by one of the three statistical approaches the researchers used. 
 
 When Boyd and Pennebaker broke the play down into acts and analyzed the texts across acts, they found a more nuanced picture. For the first three acts, the analyses continued to identify Shakespeare as the likely author; for the fourth and fifth acts, the measures varied between Shakespeare and Fletcher. Again, Theobald’s influence on the text appeared to be very minor. 
 
 “Honestly, I was surprised to see such a strong signal for Shakespeare showing through in the results,” says Boyd. “Going into the research without any real background knowledge, I had just kind of assumed that it was going to be a pretty cut and dry case of a fake Shakespeare play, which would have been really interesting in and of itself.” 
 
 By using measures that tapped into the author’s psychological profile, Boyd and Pennebaker were able to see that the author of Double Falsehood was likely sociable and fairly well educated — findings that don’t jibe with accounts of Theobald as well educated but also rigid and abrasive. 
 
 Together, these findings clearly show that exploring the psychological dimensions of a literary work can offer even deeper insight in the process of textual analysis. 
 
 “I’ve always held huge admiration for scholars who grapple with literature — there is a great deal of detective work that goes into figuring out who the authors really are ‘deep down,’ their motivations, their lives, and how these factors are embedded within their work,” says Boyd. “We demonstrate with our current work that an incredible amount of this information can be extracted automatically from language.” 
 
 The research was supported by grants from the Army Research Institute (W5J9CQ12C0043) and the National Science Foundation (IIS-1344257).
– Because politics. Because science. Because money. Remember when you'd need an "of" in these sentences? No longer, because Internet-speak, writes Megan Garber in the Atlantic. In short, the Internet has turned "because" into its own preposition (as language expert Stan Carey has pointed out). For example, the sun's turning upside down, but don't worry, "because science," the UK's Metro notes. Or "skipping lunch today because sleep," says a Twitter user. Or a politician will win "because R-Oklahoma," points out Wonkette. There are a number of theories as to how the "prepositional-because" or "because-noun" began. Memes featured it as far back as 2001 ("because f--- you"). It could be derived from the phrase, "because, hey, (insert noun here)," says linguist Neal Whitman. For instance: The politician will win "because, hey, R-Oklahoma." Or maybe it's tied to parents telling their kids no, just "because." What's clearer is why the "prepositional-because" has taken off: It "maximizes efficiency and irony in equal measure," Garber writes. Click for the full piece.