Performative gratitude

Q: I would love to see a story on “performative gratitude,” a term for expressing gratefulness when you don’t really mean it. The usage seems to be flooding society. A: As far as we can tell, “performative gratitude” first appeared about a dozen years ago on social media as a term for a formulaic or stock expression of thanks. It then spread to more mainstream media, though the word “performative” had been used earlier in various similar senses. The phrase hasn’t been recognized yet by any of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult or by the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference with more than 900,000 entries. The earliest example we’ve seen is from Twitter: “turn-offs: performative gratitude” (jamie@jmsnftzptrck, Feb. 15, 2014). The same author followed up with another tweet two years later: “ban performative gratitude and feigned modesty from poetry” (May 16, 2016). Several other tweeters then jumped in with comments of their own. Soon the phrase made the…