Why "Because" Was Named The Most Important Word Of 2013 (Hint: Because The Internet)

My boy short-circuited the other day, and I’m still looking for his reset button.  One moment he was speaking perfectly good English, and the next moment he was leaving huge portions of his thoughts out of his speech. Because adolescence. Or maybe because internet.

If you missed the recent press-stopping news coming from the American Dialect Society – a linguistic organization that takes this sort of thing seriously and where chair-breaking fights have been known to break out over dangling participles - the word “because” was voted Word of the Year because, well, popularity, I guess. It’s everywhere online, it has infiltrated everyday speech and now my son is broken.

You might be familiar with this form of linguistic short-circuiting if you happen to be in possession of a teenager. At the age of 14, my kid’s language skills consist primarily of grunts, but in this case I had asked him why he hadn’t come down to dinner when I called him, and his reply consisted solely of “Because Minecraft.” And I was supposed to understand what that meant, despite the fact that he had just uttered a sentence devoid of verbs or much of anything else.

The funny thing is, I did understand him, and I kind of like it. “Because + X” is a huge timesaver, and you even get a nice dose of snark for your money. I mean, how much more ale-drinking time would our forefathers have had if they has been able to slap their John Hancocks on a Declaration of Independence that just said “Because pursuit of happiness”?

There are a couple of hypotheses as to where this “because” trend originated. The use of “because + noun” apparently started in 2011 in a Craig’s List ad that was selling a car that the owner said was modified “because race car.”

Others believe that it’s a reduction of the longer “because, hey” punchline of jokes, like this 1987 “Deep Thoughts” by Jack Handey, an old recurring bit on Saturday Night Live:

What matters is that it caught on, and since language is a living thing that morphs to include horrifying concepts like “twerking,” we now have a way to get to the point like we’ve never gotten to the point before. Like many modern ideas, the concept has expanded beyond “+ noun” so that we are now perfectly free to “because” anything.

Try it yourself. It’s liberating! It’s a timesaver!

You can “because” your spouse:

You can “because” telemarketers:

You can “because” your kids:

You probably don’t want to “because” your boss, because unemployment:

So, go forth and “because.” Because English.