Veronica brought me a hundred newspapers so that I could check on one word. Well, she didn’t bring a wheelbarrow, but she has at her office one of those online databases that bring up published articles.
The word was performative, by which I had been annoyed on the wireless recently because a couple of speakers used it in a sense that I thought wrong. Of the 100 newspaper articles mentioning it, not one used performative correctly (to my mind). I must be the only person marching in step.
Performative was invented by an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin, who used it in lectures in 1952, then in the William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. We make performative utterances, he said, as a kind of action. Examples he gave include: I do (in the marriage ceremony), I bet, I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth, I promise, Let there be light (if you are God) and I apologise.
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