Gratitude instead of thanks is wisdom of the day – 01/03/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

New Year’s Eve is the most propitious time for this type of balance: 2023 has gone, 2024 has arrived, and “gratitude” continues to advance in its expansionist war to try to dislodge “thank you” from its position as the preferred gratitude formula in our language.

Yes: when it comes to thanking your aunt for the hidden friend’s gift or the cosmos for having survived another year on this planet that doesn’t know how to turn off its own oven, everything indicates that an unprecedented number of Portuguese speakers chose “gratitude” instead of “thank you”.

–May 2024 bring you health, joy and money!

-Gratitude!

This is the right of these speakers, of course. Even if they replaced “thank you” with a more bizarre word like “artichoke”, “eructation” or “photosynthesis”, how can we deny that we are all free to decide what comes out of our mouths? Naturally, these things have consequences.

One of them, in the case of the “gratitude” wave, is the possible landing of the word on ears that will tend to interpret it as a sign of a mind surrendered to know-it-all, nonsense that passes for common sense and even wisdom in our time of networks. social.

It was always possible to express gratitude, of course, but it used to be necessary to pay some syntactical respect to this centuries-old noun, derived from the Latin “gratitudinis”. It was very rare to see the term like this, loose in life, as if it were an interjection.

So far so good. Living languages, restless organisms, move non-stop and are subject to all kinds of fads. It turns out that calling interjectional gratitude a fad is not wrong, but it is far from exhausting the subject.

Years ago, when I started writing about language in the press, gratitude was not yet used in this way – or it was used in such restricted bubbles that few people had woken up to the novelty. I know this because I’ve written repeatedly about “thank you,” but the conversation at the time was different.

The issue of gender was discussed: was it right that more and more women chose to say “thank you”, in the masculine form? The topic was interesting from a historical point of view. Being an adjective in origin, it is obvious that, as tradition dictates, the word should be inflected: obliged, obliged.

However, although little recognized as such by lexicographers, in practice that thank you had long ago become a fixed formula, a word increasingly understood as an interjection. In this sense, it was natural for it to remain invariable.

If its origin in the expression “I am obliged to you”, that is, “I become your debtor”, was almost lost in the memory of the language, why insist that obliged be treated as an adjective?

For it was this faded memory that emerging usage tried to revive to use as an accusation of “thank you”. What do you mean, debtor? What contractual and materialistic obligation is this? The horror!

Maybe “gratitude” is just one of those linguistic viruses that infect crowds for a few Januarys before returning to limbo, but it’s also a good example of how know-it-all logic works.

As shallow as it is full of itself, as arbitrary in its condemnation of consecrated usages as it is convinced of its own virtue, the know-it-all that turns against the very polite “thank you” is the same that has already tried — with limited success, but still regrettable — to criminalize the “risk of life.”

And if anyone thinks I missed talking about “gratiluz”, I apologize. This is a family newspaper.

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