Because reasons

because can be followed by a finite clause:

I left him because [he sold my prize-winning armadillo].

It can be followed by a prepositional phrase:

I left him because [of his unbearable stench]. 

But a non-standard usage is gaining wider and wider acceptance, namely because+noun (often a proper noun):

I can't come out tonight because Skyrim.

This isn't a straight nonstandard equivalent to the other uses - it's different. It means something like 'I'm so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don't need to explain further, and you should know about this because it's a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing'. This page is all posts that were tagged with #because Skyrim.

But has a similar use (taken from the same Tumblr page):

Okay I’d totally love to read my dash and everything but Skyrim.

I like it.

Emotigif

I just made up a word. I happened to need a word to describe the gifs that some kids make of themselves to express the way they feel about a thing, and I picked emotigif.

Actually, those of you who spend less time pootling around on the internet than I do will need some kind of explanation here.

On Tumblr, which is a blogging site which is mostly devoted to teenagers endlessly reblogging each other's inane cute/humorous images, telling the world about their love of Matt Smith/Benedict Cumberbatch and delivering expletive-laden diatribes on other people's inability to use the words you're and your correctly, people like to express their feelings on a subject by adding a gif (a simple moving image on a short loop) to their post. This is a gif which in no way expresses my feelings:

These gifs are commonly snippets of films or TV programmes, with a close up of an actor or celebrity making some kind of easily-interpreted facial expression or action (sometimes with speech which is usually also provided in writing). Like this:

Anyway, sometimes people apparently feel that there isn't a gif that expresses their emotions well enough. This is commonly when they need to express the emotion 'Yeah bitch, I'm totally right about this trivial issue in a really camp way and will therefore do a stereotypical camp finger-pointy head-waggly shoulder-shrugging movement shot at a bad angle that makes it obvious that this is taken with the substandard camera on my laptop in bad light in my bedroom and put it on the internet'. Like this:

This, my friends, is an emotigif. Based on emoticon, obviously. I learnt in the process of researching this post that they are already called 'reaction gifs', but my name is better.

Do you even know what you're saying?

We are surprisingly unaware of what we're saying. The actual words, I mean - we're astonishingly good at remembering the content or the general gist of a conversation, but very bad at remembering precisely what words were used. Many an argument has been built on just such a memory failing.

Linguists are more inclined than most to notice the way people say things, as well as what they actually say (or instead of what they say, sometimes). We're familiar with the informants who, presented with a questionnaire, claim never to use construction X, and then go on to do so in the next sentence, and what's more we know that we do this ourselves. But even we are not always aware of the way we speak.

This is one of the things I teach my students, in passing. In an early dialectology seminar we discuss a list of non-standard grammatical constructions that they are supposed to have surveyed their friends' use of. One of them is the doubling of comparatives and superlatives, such as most biggest or more uglier. Every year, without fail, the students look at me in utter disbelief when I suggest that people do this a heck of a lot. I do it, all the time. I know that it's a shibboleth (a linguistic thing that marks you out as different. Or a moron, if you read the insane rantings on the Tumblr #grammar tag) but I like it. But they really don't think that anyone ever says that sort of thing. I tell them that if they listen out for it, they'll hear it, and generally I've already done it once by the time we get to that point anyway.

There was a lovely example of just this at the PG conference held at my university last week. My friend gave a talk on sentence-final like (it was canny good like). In the question period (during which I asked a question that inadvertently included a sentence-final like), she mentioned that there is also reported to be a sentence-final but. Then she said, I've never heard it but. Brilliant. Within the very sentence in which she doubted that it was common, she uttered it herself.*

*(It was an intermediate version of final but, actually, one of the ones that Jean Mulder describes as not a true sentence-final particle, but equally not simply ellipsis with a missing but-clause. But this is all for another day, another post.)

I'm good thanks

From my Tumblr:

[This is a reblog of a post by a meme tumblr which posts these memes made by 'English majors', and they're pretty snobby about correct punctuation and usage, though you wouldn't know it from the amount of mistakes in their posts. They're also snobby about everything else, including what books they've read, how books are better than everything else, and how nerdy they are. Their post consists of just the meme; the comments below are mine.]

Now, setting aside the fact that some adaptations are a gazillion times better than the book (Lord of the Rings springs to mind), this is about interchanging ‘well’ and ‘good’. Normally, this peeve centres around saying ‘I’m good’ when what the prescriptivists think you should say is ‘I’m well’. I have NEVER EVER heard anyone say anything like the text in the image (‘The adaptation did a well job of…’). I can’t imagine that anyone possibly could - it’s not just wrong in a prescriptive sense, it sounds wrong in a genuinely ungrammatical sense. But hey, dialects differ.

But my guess, if anyone actually did say this, is that it’s because they’ve been told so many times about not saying ‘good’ when you should say ‘well’, that they’ve hyper-corrected. That’s when you change something that was already right because you’re worried about getting it wrong and not quite clear on what the rules are. It’s like when stereotypical Cockney policemen put ‘h’ on words that shouldn’t have it, because they’re hyper-correcting and know they shouldn’t drop the h. So, you know, if this bothers you, stop telling people off for saying ‘I’m good’. If you hadn’t done that, none of this would ever have happened. 

Hi, I've just moved in.

I've been over at Tumblr but I don't like Harry Potter. They do let you in, but you have to accept the vast amount of Potter love, mixed in with the Doctor Who/Sherlock adoration. I like Doctor Who, but not to the point of obsession. So I've come here where things might be more sensible and grown up.

I like linguistics, making things and reading. I blog mostly about linguistics. For making things, see my other blog.