I've long been annoyed by those linguistic troglodytes who, with distressingly increasing frequency, mispronounce aforementioned by stressing the first syllable: "affer-mentioned." (It's normally pronounced "uh-fore-mentioned." Look it up.) And these days, a new annoyance has emerged: misusing the word performative. Here's a recent example:
“The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things[, and their publishing of] Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” the employee added.
We won't get into the abomination of a neologism like allyship. Let's concentrate, instead, on the use of performative in the above quote. In context, the term means "insincere" in the way that something is performed to give the outward impression of sincerity or earnestness without being sincere or earnest. Something performative, according to this usage, is the opposite of my high school's awesome motto: Esse non videri, i.e., Being, not seeming. A performative thing is therefore done merely for the sake of seeming to be so.
Korean office workers often appear busy, but this conduct is performative.
This is not what performative normally means. In fact, as a technical term used in fields like philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, performative means almost the opposite of the above-discussed meaning. The phrase performative utterance, often used in anthropology, refers to an utterance that makes something a reality, i.e., that confers being, not seeming. When the officiant at a wedding declares, "I now pronounce you man and wife," the two people being married are indeed married at that moment, and not before. That's how a performative utterance works. Alas, this new use (to my mind, misuse) of performative has crept into modern parlance over the past year or so, and it irks me greatly. Sadly, when stupidity gathers momentum, there's little that can be done to stop it. Mistakes, when propagated, become acceptable usage, and that's how the idiots among us eventually triumph. And so it is that more and more people will say "affer-mentioned" and use performative to mean something like "outwardly sincere but inwardly insincere."
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