Seán Moncrieff: What does the word ‘woke’ really mean?

The word “woke” is being thrown about a lot. Some elected representatives and future candidates are already in full-complaint mode about the excessive wokeness of our Government: which, as a linguistic phenomenon, is fascinating. For most of its lifetime, “woke” has been African-American vernacular, but now routinely comes out of the mouths of people from Kerry or Offaly. It’s like if you met Willie O’Dea and he said Yo.

People who know a lot about this kind of thing have traced it back as far as 1938 when it was used by the American folk singer Lead Belly. The phase he used was “stay woke” – be alert to physical danger. But it emerged into widespread use (ie by non-Black United States) only after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. “Stay woke” appeared extensively on Twitter, on T-shirts and various other media as an exhortation to be aware of America’s racial disparities.

Over time, the term was broadened out to include other issues of concern to left-of-centre Americans. But not much time. In less than a decade, it has come to mean something quite different: a kind of lefty tyranny; a form of self-righteous thought-policing. The term has been rebranded into an exclusively disparaging one.

Credit where it’s due: this was down to some deft linguistic engineering by those on the right-of-centre (and even righter than that). By continuously describing anything they objected to as “woke”, they managed to depict their political adversaries as mindless ideologues and themselves as victims of an independence-crushing machine. (They also managed, puzzlingly, to force the media into using inverted commas. It’s always “woke”, not woke or Woke.)

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Seán Moncrieff: What does the word ‘woke’ really mean?

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[ Opinion: Is ‘wokeness’ really the new religion? I find that hard to believe ]

There’s nothing new about this. Back in the 1980s, the term political correctness – or PC – suffered exactly the same fate. And this re-engineering of words is an ongoing process. Not too long ago I interviewed a spokeswoman for the Enhanced Games: an international athletics event planned for next year. Backed by a few crypto/tech billionaire types, the Enhanced Games’ unique selling point is that it won’t ask any questions – or conduct any tests – to look for performance enhancing drugs.

The grotesqueness of the concept is compounded by a refusal on the part of the organisers to describe the event for what it is. Instead, words and their meanings have to be mangled.

The spokeswoman told me they won’t encourage doping; rather, the competitors will be given choice. Repeatedly – and all with a completely straight face – she claimed that the Enhanced Games would be educational (though she couldn’t explain why) and, most importantly, the event would be – wait for it – inclusive.

“Inclusive” is another one of those words that grates with people of a certain political disposition. But thanks to the Enhanced Games, it’s already well on its way to becoming a Dr Frankenstein version of what it was. Their website has a page on how Wikipedia “continues to use archaic and harmful terminology when describing the inclusion of science in sports”. It encourages the “enhanced movement” to lobby Wikipedia to get rid of “slurs” like “doping”.

There’s a link to their Inclusive Language Guide where it gets even better: terms like “doping”, they say, are colonialist and racist in origin. And to complete the set of woke-sounding references, the pages reveal that it drew inspiration from an Australian LGBTIQA+ language guide.

Perhaps in time we’ll discover that Armando Iannucci cooked this up. But I suspect not: I suspect they genuinely believe that through faux-conviction and repetition, they can change what words mean. And why not? It happens all the time. Culture war battles are as much about how we describe things as the things themselves.

The website declares that “language matters”, while demonstrating that the opposite has become increasingly common. If the same sets of words can be pressed into the service of wildly contradictory ideas, we’re doomed to end up saying nothing at all.