Im/politenessIm/politeness isPolitenessim/politeness not just something that we perform, but also something that we think and talk about. For example, if a workplace superior says something inappropriate to you, you can consciously register your evaluation of the behaviour as “impolite”. You can then manifest your impoliteness to your superior in various ways that may be more explicit (e.g., “How rude of you to say that!”) through to more implicit (e.g., frowning and avoiding eye contact). After the encounter, you can then discuss the superior’s behaviour with a friend or write a post on Twitter about it. This post on Twitter might catch the attentionAttention of a national newspaper who runs a story about the inappropriate behaviour of workplace superiors these days, or an academic who uses the incident as the basis for theorizing about the workings of impoliteness. Discourses about im/politenessIm/politeness and related phenomenon are all around us and, as pointed out by (Kádár and Haugh, Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 181), historical evidence shows that they have been going on for thousands of years (see for example Jucker, Politeness in the history of English. Cambridge University Press, 2020; Kádá in Terms of (im) politeness: A study of communicational properties of traditional Chinese (im) polite terms of address, vol 2. Eötvös Loránd University Press, 2007).