Motive Not Reason
When my daughter was first learning to speak, she would often explain a cause-effect relationship using words like, “The milk spilled. The matter why is I bumped the table”. I’ve heard other children speak the same. When children cry, adults often ask, “What’s the matter?”, which the child soon understands to mean “Why are you crying?”. Matter == why. It’s imprecise language by adults that gets patterned by children.
In fact, some of the most grevious imprecisions in common language are phrases which deal with cause and effect. One particularly troublesome nit is the way that people confuse “motive” and “reason“.
For a glass of milk, there is no difference. When you want to know why the milk spilled, you don’t have to wonder about the glass’s motive.
For people, when you want to know why someone did something, you are asking about motive. Calling it “reason” poisons the wells. 90% of the time, the reason given by a person is not the motive, so it is very important to make a distinction. “Reason” evokes the example of milk spilling due to deterministic external forces, and masks the responsibility of the person choosing to act. “Reason” sounds scientific and “rational”, when human motives are anything but rational. And 90% of the time, when you ask for a reason, you get an excuse manufactured to justify the action.