If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet woke has a surprisingly short history as a notable term. Though it was birthed in the 19th century, with noble origins surrounding the struggle for civil rights, it achieved its present, greater and much-changed salience as late as the 2010s – the Oxford English Dictionary only included it in 2017.

The argument that woke cannot be defined, is bogus. It is difficult to define, but that is a different thing

Since then, the word, initially deployed by people on the left as a badge of pride – epitomising their awareness of social justice – has become more of a boo word, used by people on the right, generally expressing dislike or contempt for perceived leftwing idiocies. In this usage it becomes a kind of swearword and one that can be spat with gratifying, four-letter venom. As the word woke has been ‘weaponised’, so the woke left have fought back (these lexical skirmishes are a fascinatingly fierce corner of the wider culture wars).

QOSHE - Why wokeness really is like fascism - Sean Thomas
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Why wokeness really is like fascism

4 1
27.12.2023

If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet........

© The Spectator


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