Man with Megaphone (bus by Corgi)

Spot the mistake in this sentence:

“Just because everyone else makes this mistake doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”

Answer:

That sentence doesn’t have a subject! What exactly “doesn’t mean you have to do the same”? Grammatically speaking, you can’t make a qualifying clause (“Just because…”) the subject. You need a noun or a pronoun.

“Although everyone else makes this mistake, THAT doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”

OR

“THE FACT THAT everyone else makes this mistake doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”

OR

“Just because everyone else makes this mistake, YOU don’t have to do the same.”

The problem:

People are allowing phrases beginning with “Because” to float away into a kind of grammatical nebula, and are continuing their sentences with what they would like to have said, not what they actually did say. It happens more in the spoken word than in writing. Simplify it, and you get something like:

“Because this is black means it isn’t white.”

It sounds a bit weird, don’t you think?

Seriously? Do we care?

Among grammatical mistakes, this is probably one of the least problematic. Everyone knows what incorrect sentences like this mean, and people have been using this type of construction (or misconstruction?) forever. So why should we care?

It’s because “just because” will immediately trigger an alarm bell in the minds of people like me who prize clarity. We’ll be waiting to see if the sentence finishes correctly instead of listening to hear the point that is being made.

What’s that you say? “Get a life” or similar?

I hear you.

The megaphone effect

But there’s a bigger point at issue here. Slips in the clarity of speech and writing tend to be amplified by people with a metaphorical megaphone – broadcasters, politicians, pundits, influencers. The pragmatists will argue that this is how grammar evolves, and we should accept it with a shrug. Maybe, up to a point; but let’s keep constantly in mind that we don’t have to drift into careless speech and writing “just because everyone else does.”

That’s definitely a slippery slope.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.