'How are you?' isn't a question — linguists have a name for talk that isn't about anything

In 1923, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski coined 'phatic communion' for speech whose function isn't to exchange information, but simply to establish a social bond: small talk about weather, a passing 'how's it going,' comments on the obvious. He observed that in many cultures, a huge share of daily conversation exists purely to signal friendliness and presence rather than to say anything new. Linguists still use his term to explain why a literal answer to 'how are you?' feels so wrong.

— Bronisław Malinowski, The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages — 1923