Re-read Charlotte Sometimes the other day

[conuly]

The book was published in 1969, and probably set around 1962. Charlotte refers to 1918 as "more than 40 years ago" rather than "more than 50 years ago", and the book takes place not long after The Summer Birds, which was published in 1960.

This book is the one that introduced me to the Spanish Flu, for one thing, and also the Monkey Puzzle Tree. I spent years of my life wondering what on earth such a tree might look like. (This book also introduced me to the fact that there are people who are incredibly ignorant of history. Charlotte doesn't know whether the war in 1918 was the first or second world war. For crying out loud, how could she be so ignorant? I had no idea as a child, and I have no idea now. But maybe I shouldn't criticize - I confused the civil rights movement and the civil war for an embarrassingly long time.)

Anyway, I'm mentioning all this because I noticed something interesting in the middle of the book, two sentences:

1. It had a story in it, some bits of other stories, also drawings, rather brown and faded looking now, because done when Arthur was a boy.

2. It was an easy thought, Charlotte decided, because quite impossible.

Did you catch it? I must have read this book easily a dozen times or more, never noticed those sentences until this re-read. Because done. Because quite impossible. Here I thought that was really a very new construction, so what's it doing in a book from the 1960s? Once might be a typo, but twice?

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Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Well, "because done" or "because impossible" isn't entirely the same thing as "because reasons". Perfect participles as well as adjectives can be used without verbal constructions ("Impossible!" is just as correct as "This is impossible!"; "Built in 1968, the lighthouse overlooks the harbour of XYZ" is just as correct as "Having been built in 1968,..."), so it isn't such a big step to extend this option to secondary clauses, making them sorta adverbial? I dunno. At any rate, it's the sort of streamlined language common to Latin and 19th century English, and might actually be considered posh. (Or just pedantic. But not ungrammatical.)

"Because reasons", on the other hand, is working with nouns, which do require either a verb or the genitive case ("because I had my reasons", "because of Zombies"). Dropping this is a conscious act of constructing an incorrect sentence (for reasons of irony). So it's a different thing, and just because one has been used as far back as the 1960s (and possibly earlier!), that doesn't mean the other has been in use for equally long. Although it might well be just as old, of course. Your example neither proves nor disproves that.