Deviant accounts are linguistic devices intended to exonerate the narrator for putative wrongdoing. Sociologists have identified at least half a dozen types of deviant accounts, including excuses (a denial of responsibility), exceptionalization (denial that the act belongs to a generic class of wrongful behaviors), justifications (explaining why a generally wrongful act had to be committed and hence, why it is not so wrongful), and normalization (denial that an entire class of actions that are regarded as wrongful are wrongful at all). Though accounts are not causes of deviance, they comprise a fundamental and nearly universal feature of non-normative behavior.