'Virtue-signalling' -- the putdown that has passed its sell-by date

As the Boston Globe columnist Mark Peters has pointed out, "virtue-signalling" has existed in isolated pockets since at least 2004, but was popularised (not, as he claims, invented) by James Bartholomew in the Spectator in April 2015. If you've heard the phrase recently, it's most likely being used according to his definition [...]

"Virtue-signalling" is also a neat, pithy phrase, with - and this is the killer, really - a social-sciencey air, as though it's a phenomenon recorded by behavioural economists and factored into nudge-unit projections of how many men pee standing up. (As of January 2016, however, a Google scholar search for the term yields only a handful of citations related to the work of a single religious studies academic.)