The American Dialect Society has chosen "because" as its word of the year. I know, you were expecting either a young-people's slang term, or a tech term that some editor thinks is about to take off. So, they chose a word that has existed since time immemorial. As you might guess, a Dialect Society is a little more sophisticated than a mainstream dictionary, so they are not choosing a word so much as a use of a word.
They're choosing its new and trendy use as an agrammatical expression of vague explanation, as in, "I'm writing about words because boredom."
It's interesting because just the other day, I had one of my epiphanies where I suddenly and immediately get tired of a trend. I read yet another tweet using "because reasons," and I was finally done with it. This use of because can be useful to ridicule lack of reasoning, (e.g. "because science") but it's just become a grating way to excuse laziness. So I'm going to create my own uses of words, result fame.
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