Thursday, July 25, 2013

due to vs. because of

Based on a headline I just saw on my blog's news feed:

Korean Families Remain Separated ______ North Korea

a. Due to
b. Because of

Which is correct? The above example is similar to

The baseball game has been canceled ______ bad weather.

a. due to
b. because of


_

2 comments:

Charles said...

That's got to be "because of," right? I believe you're only supposed to use "due to" with nouns, e.g. "The delay was due to bad weather."

John from Daejeon said...

Back in them olden days, "due to" would be considered incorrect. But due to the fact that so many people use, and understand, its current usage as a "modern-day" preposition, I would have to say that both are "now" correct.

Even "tight-cheeked" English purists would have to admit to that as we move into a world of hash-tags (instead of the pound sign, number sign, the sharp symbol in music, or the insert space symbol when editing) and other text message gobbledygook that is now becoming a common part of the English language mainstream. I'm not one to lol, but I do have to try to stay hip to the latest jargon and word usage, or I'll end up on the slag heap with all the other English/language dinosaurs. That's where I'm pretty sure both my 8th and 11th grade English teachers, and my 11th grade Spanish teacher, are currently cut off from the modern world in the pre-ebook/Internet past. I can't even imagine the coronaries they probably had when Cormac McCarthy advocated against the usage of quotation marks and semicolons in writing when he was on "Oprah" in 2007.

Conversely, my favorite college Spanish teacher is now running the entire shebang as the president at a small university due to her facility in keeping up to date with the latest changes in both the ever-continuing growth of all language/media and in dealing with youngsters that were raised, and are living, in a time of extremely rapid changes in just how fast things are now changing when compared to previous generations. If I hadn't hopped on this relatively recent hash-tag bandwagon, I'd have been sloughed off to the side with the likes of Ma Bell's land-lines and her old rotary dial telephones, videotape, compact discs, and print newspapers.