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!