We hear so much about how English is going to the dogs. But I'm having a hard time seeing those dogs of late. In the way young people are texting, tweeting and just plain talking, I see, of all things, warmth. American English is getting sweeter all the time.

Take the peculiarly witty locution that the American Dialect Society just anointed as the word of the year, the new because. It is now acceptable, at least in tweets and such, to write things like “I stayed home because weather,” “I just eat them by the handful because chocolate,” and “Dow closes at record high for 35th time this year because Obama.”

Some have suggested that this new usage hotly insists that something is “a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing.” However, that one doesn’t really work for things like the weather, or “Going to bed at nine because tired.” What all of these usages of the new because have in common is that they imply that the reader shares the same specific, many-layered feeling about the thing referred to—i.e. the particular joy of chocolate or the particular state of the weather at a given time and what the proper responses are to it.

That is, the new because is about the mental nuances that we all have in common. It reaches out—the linguistic expression of a lifted eyebrow, a stretched out vowel (think Homer Simpson’s “Mmm, chahhhhhh-colaaaate …”), or a touch on the arm. It’s a substitute in text messages for things like facial expressions, vocal intonations, and body language. But because texting is a more deliberate activity than casual speaking, people can be more pointedly expressive than they might in a face-to-face conversation.

The famous LOL is similar. No longer just a literal acronym for “laughing out loud,” it now decorates texts in a way that seems random, but in fact solicits affirmation of common sentiment. “I’m in the library lol” in a student’s text doesn’t mean that there is something rib-tickling about the statement, but that the reader knows the drudgery of being in the library rather being somewhere else.