Mediaboss Marketing

An old word used in a new way gets the nod as the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2013.

The Word of the Year season seems to begin earlier and run later every year, not unlike the Christmas shopping season: candy canes on the way home from your Labor Day barbecue, anyone?

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition

And with so many organizations choosing a Word of the Year, or WOTY, one triangulates among them, as movie buffs pay attention to the Golden Globes to determine which films will clean up at the Oscars.

The Oxford Dictionaries came out Nov. 19 with selfie as their word for 2013. Oxford has generally picked different words for different sides of the Atlantic, reinforcing the idea of "two peoples separated by a common language."

But this year, there was just one WOTY, and the choice was "unanimous, with very little argument," an Oxford press release said. (For those who spent last year in a cave: A selfie is an informal self-portrait, often with others, generally taken with a smart phone.)

But the American Dialect Society's WOTY is, in the eyes of many linguists, the one that really counts. It is, to quote that source of wisdom, Wikipedia, "the oldest of these" going all the way back to the early 1990s. It's announced after the calendar year ends, "determined by a vote of independent linguists, and not tied to commercial interests." And for 2013, the ADS Word of the Year is (drumroll!) ... because.

Come again? Yes, because as a preposition, although that's not exactly how the ADS explains it.

"The selection recognized that because is now being used in new ways to introduce a noun, adjective, or other part of speech," the ADS said.

Read more:
Because they said so, that's why