Language shifts are interesting. Double language shifts in a short time, even more.

Over the last couple of years, there is a little idiom that has appeared in English, which is the use of “because” followed by a noun—no proposition, no explanation, indeed often repeating a word in the previous sentence. For example, “I’m going to stop at the chocolate shop on the way home, because chocolate.”. This had a clear meaning, that of saying that the action is actually self-evident; it isn’t just lazy leaving out of some parts of the explanation. The above sentence means something like “I’m going to stop off at the chocolate shop on the way home, because, well, if I have to explain to you why getting chocolate is a good thing then there must be something wrong with you.”. You can almost hear someone saying it “because…….(long pause to try and think of an explanation)………chocolate”. “Because because” is a similar expression. There is a decent attempt to explain the linguistics behind this by Geoff Pullum on a recent language log article.

Interestingly, after a couple of years of this having quite a specific meaning, it is now starting to influence the day-to-day use of “because”, and we are starting to see the use of “because NOUN” as a simple lazy compression. Take this real-world example from a blog comment: “You’re not depressed because single.”. Contrasted to the above example, where the sentence essentially contains the same meaning as “I’m going to stop off at the chocolate shop on the way home.”, the recent example cannot cut off everything before the “because” without changing the substantive meaning: “You’re not depressed.” doesn’t have anything like the same meaning. I have collected a couple more examples just in a few days of noticing this: “The kids are encouraged to misbehave because good TV.”, “…we ate plum pudding on the 21st of December because Jewish.”.

In the course of a couple of years we have gone from creating an interesting new idiomatic expression to it being on the point of vanishing!

There is an interesting document called A Brief List of Misused English Terms in EU Publications, which lists a mixture of quasi-English Eurocrat terms of art and commonly used English expressions that no native speaker would use.

This includes a number of perfectly reasonable variant usages of the English language which have a particular connotation (e.g. “adequate”, which tends to be used in native English to mean “just about okay” rather than “matching all requirements”; “Anglo-Saxon”, which has a rather pejorative sense in native English); words that have a fairly general meaning (like “agent”) which are only really used in a small number of contexts (“secret agent”, “newsagent”—a joke which my friend Matthew Jarron dined out on for years; “aids” which are only helpful inanimate objects and not helpful people or actions); grammatical formations (like “planification” and “to precise”) that could exist in English but don’t; words that sound as if they could be English but aren’t (“fiche”); and, truly sui generis examples like “comitology” for “committee practice”.

It is interesting to note such examples from day-to-day usage too. That is, not one person’s random misunderstanding, but expressions that are part of a “European English”. For example, in travelling around Europe and speaking to non-native speakers, I frequently come across the following:

• Cocktail as the name of an event where drinks and canapés are served (often not, even more weirdly, cocktails). Almost every event that I go to around Europe has something labelled on the programme as a “welcome cocktail”, “farewell cocktail” or similar. This isn’t just the metonymic use of the drink for the event, like “welcome beer”; people say things like “Are you going to the cocktail?”, clearly using “cocktail” to denote the event itself. We usually call this a “reception” in native English; this also has the connotations of something that will be a fairly brief event, a pre-dinner or pre-departure event lasting an hour or two, contrasted with, say, “party” which could go on all night.
• Typical (often spelled “tipical”) to mean “from the region”. “Typical buffet” or “typical specialities” are often to be found in restaurants and hotels. We don’t say this in native English, preferring “local” or the actual name of the region: “Cornish specialities” (which is still a bit naff and olde tyme).
• Menu to imply a fixed-price limited-choice meal. We don’t really do this in England/Scotland. The main exception is in fast-food places, which adopt the Americanised use of “meal” (“I’ll have a BigMac Meal, please” (perhaps substituting “innit” for “please”)), or (in Scotland) use the word “supper” (“A haggis supper, please”), or just use the full name (“Spam fritter and chips, please”).
• In travel to mean “travelling”. “I can’t see you next week, I’m in travel until next Thursday” is a popular sort of expression. The choice of whether to use a straightforward noun or a gerund, whether to use a preposition, and then which preposition to use, is a great challenge even for advanced non-native speakers.
• Interessant sounds like it could be English, and is particularly confusing to speakers of lots of Euro-languages because it is used (in some spelling or other) for “interesting” in most other parts of Europe, both from the Romance and Germanic side: French, German, Spanish, (…turning to Google Translate…) Swedish, Dutch, Romanian, Albanian, Maltese, Bulgarian, …
• Funny used as adjective to mean “creating a feeling of fun” rather than “entertaining”. “Ballroom dancing is funny” would mean in English-english “I think it is hilarious watching ballroom dancing” and never “I have fun doing ballroom dancing”.
• ..and the idea that Handy isn’t English slang for mobile phone, despite being an English word, must be terribly confusing to native German speakers.

Any other examples?

Increasingly seeing the word “staffs” as the plural of “staff”; example:

Weirdly (or, whilst we’re on the topic of language change, perhaps that should be “wierdly”) the word is used “correctly” later in the same sentence.

The word “wear” seems to be used for an increasingly wide range of things. We used to say of someone with a beard that they “had” a beard, now it seems increasingly common to talk about “wearing” a beard. This makes me think of those false beards that people use when they are pretending to be Santa Claus.

Now, today, I’ve come across the notion of wearing a handbag, (as part of my copious trawling the web for handbag-related webpages). This seems equally incongruous, bringing to mind it sitting around someone’s neck like a necklace.

Just realised that I’ve been misunderstanding the word “circumspect” all of my life. I had always assumed that it meant looking at something briefly or superficially, but looking it up after seeing it in a context where that doesn’t work, I realise that it means more-or-less the opposite: looking carefully at all aspects of a situation. This illustrates a danger with trying to understand words from their etymology—I had assumed that it meant “looking just around the edge of something” like the use of “circum” in “circumference”, not “looking at something from all aspects”.