'Virtue-signalling' – the putdown that has passed its sell-by date | David Shariatmadari

It started as a pithy way of calling out people who parade their convictions just to look good. But it's flawed and out of control

How do we get new words? There are a few different ways. Goods from overseas can carry their foreign language names with them: potato from Carib, or tomato from Nahuatl. New technologies require labels which we get to invent ourselves: the telephone, the laptop, Wi-Fi. Politics and culture throw up new ideas and patterns of behaviour: we try to encapsulate them. It's that last category that's the most fun - lots of people raid the linguistic dressing-up box, throwing out things like narcissocracy and iHunch and zero-tasking and vegangelical, but only the smartest and most memorable survive.

Like all easily reproducible packages of information, these expressions behave like viruses. They can die out before they really catch on. They can reach epidemic proportions, before embedding themselves in the lexical DNA or disappearing as quickly as they came. Words of the year lists are littered with examples. "Web" stuck (American Dialect Society, 1995). Who says "information superhighway" (1993) now, though? App (2010) is still with us. But does anyone expect to be saying "dadbod" (Collins, 2015) in 10 years time?