Sometimes I worry about what is happening to higher education – not just here, but around the English-speaking world. My hackles have been raised (most recently! It happens often!) by a faculty member at Harvard. Alison Wood Brooks is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow at the Harvard Business School. The Harvard website tells us that she teaches a cutting-edge course in the MBA curriculum called ‘How to talk gooder in business and life’. I beg your pardon? ‘Gooder’? How come a Harvard Associate Professor fails basic English and is still employed? Primary school kids are taught the comparative and superlative forms of the word ‘good’ – which you remember from your school days as: ‘good’, ‘better’, best’. How come a Harvard Professor doesn’t know this in 2026? The content of this appallingly named course seems to be very sensible. It’s all about how to listen well. Professor Wood Brooks says, ‘Listening to somebody’s statement then probing for more information is a superhero move, and a shockingly low number of people think to do it. You should show you’re listening by saying you are out loud.’ Perfectly correct. And a good thing to teach MBA students. But not a ‘gooder’ thing – because there is no such word. Harvard, prove that you are still part of the intelligent, educated world by disciplining this person!

The expression ‘performative gratitude’ first appeared around a dozen years ago on social media and then spread to more mainstream media. In Psychology Today Dr Joel Wong wrote, ‘performative gratitude occurs when we express thanks not out of genuine appreciation but to burnish our social image. Like other forms of virtue signalling, it thrives on public display – especially on social media’. The example he gives is someone who gushes out thanks to everyone on their LinkedIn page ‘who has helped’. This, he claims, is not sincere gratitude but a performance to show what a nice person you are. His description reminded me of the little speeches given by winners at the Oscars, the Grammys, the Logies or any of those award shows. These speeches usually consist of a ‘performance’ of over-flowing gratitude. They thank their producer, the rest of the cast, and then everyone from their mother to God himself. ‘Performative gratitude’ is so far found in none of the major dictionaries. However, I wonder if ‘performative gratitude’ is always a negative thing. Yes, I agree that when people gush insincerely that is nonsense and should never be taken seriously. But there are lots of much smaller acts of ‘performative gratitude’, many of them almost automatic and unthinking, that help to grease social cohesion. When someone does some small thing for us, even if it’s just handing over the coffee we ordered at the local coffee shop, we automatically say, ‘Thanks.’ And I think we should. It’s not profound. It’s not deep. It’s just a little bit of ‘performative gratitude’. But it is nice!

When people in a rural area are upset by ugly developments marching across their landscape, what word best describes their feelings. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined a word to name the distress these people feel. His new word is ‘solastalgia’. He says he has derived this as a ‘portmanteau word’ which combines elements from ‘solace’ (comfort, consolation, the alleviation of sorrow) ‘desolation’ (devastated) ‘nostalgia’ (sentimental longing, regretful memory) and ‘algia’ (pain). He says he coined the word in 2003 and that since then it has been used in court cases, academia, public policy, books and music. It is not yet listed in any of the major dictionaries. However, it does appear in the hyper-hip online Urban Dictionary which gives following definition: ‘A form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change.’ In other words, when farmers see giant, ugly power lines marching across their landscape – forced on them by ideological governments – destroying good farmland, killing local wildlife and creating a massive waste-disposal problem for the future – what they feel is ‘solastalgia’.

The word has been listed by the Collins Dictionary as a new word suggestion, and is ‘being monitored for evidence of usage.’