> Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you can't define woke' canard I keep seeing.
Trouble is, I said "[not] coherent enough to be tested" rather than "you can't define it"; and the comment you're replying to gives another definition that is a better pattern match for the following headlines:
"The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol" - Daily Mail, 22 April 2021
"UK builders go WOKE: Study finds three quarters of tradesmen discuss their feelings with colleagues while two thirds shun the fried breakfasts and nearly half say they are history buffs" - Daily Mail, 18 June 2022
Here's another definition of "woke":
"alert to racial prejudice and discrimination" — c. 1930s AAVE
But again, here's a completely different one, one that doesn't directly touch on race issues at all:
"to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures." — David Brooks, 2017
When a word means everything, it means nothing; when it shifts meaning under your feet as fast as "woke" has, it's as valuable for communicating as the Papiermark in the Weimar Republic was for trading.
Proof by Daily Mail headline, really? Do you think that's convincing to anyone?
The word woke doesn't mean everything, it has a very widely understood meaning. Even though you're literally citing clickbait as a rebuttal, the first article you mention is consistent with the definitions given above:
> "The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol" - Daily Mail, 22 April 2021
This is a reference to woke people's usage of "cultural appropriation" as an attack, arguing that "white" people shouldn't cook or alter the recipes for dishes from other cultures. It's an outgrowth of the obsession with race.
> to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures.
You say this quote has nothing to do with race. From just a few sentences earlier in the article you're quoting:
The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Embrace it or not, B.L.M. is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.
The reality is that the word woke is a very clear ideology with well understood roots in Marxist oppressor/oppressed worldviews. There isn't actually any lack of understanding of what it means, except amongst woke people themselves who like to believe that they aren't ideological actors following a herd but rather purely rational beings who just all happen to conclude the same things at the same time.
> Proof by Daily Mail headline, really? Do you think that's convincing to anyone?
Presumably the headlines are convincing to Daily Mail readers, of whom there are many.
However, the purpose of me using them is to seek examples of usage which doesn't match the other specified patterns; in this regard, "random large newspaper" should suffice regardless of my personal opinion of them being "should be in fiction section".
I could also have quoted newspapers being upset that the Church of England is "woke" for having gender-neutral pronouns for God, that Lego is "woke" for having a new range of disabled figurines, that the National Trust is "woke" for saying that Henry VIII was disabled in later life, or that Disney is "woke" because of their support for LGBT issues, but I (apparently incorrectly) assumed those examples would be enough.
> it has a very widely understood meaning.
"A" in the sense of exactly one, or at least one? Because I'm agreeing with the second, not the first.
Heck, this thread should be existence proof of there being more than one — if you reply to nothing else here, this one point is what I would ask you to focus on, because it's the most confusing to me. It's like all the people who say all Christians are the same before attacking (sometimes literally) other denominations, or all the Brexit campaigners who say the other Brexit campaigners are actually just Remainers because their vision for Brexit is one they don't like.
> You say this quote has nothing to do with race. From just a few sentences earlier in the article you're quoting:
What I said was:
> Here's another definition of "woke": […] But again, here's a completely different one, one that doesn't directly touch on race issues at all
Key words: "Definition" and "Directly".
And the article is behind a paywall, I got the quote from Wikipedia; do you expect most people using the term — not just people like me, who have seen this done a dozen times with various political clichés and are tired of watching fashions change, but also those who actively use the word to describe a behaviour they're supporting or opposing — to have read exhaustively all the source material before opining politically in public about if "woke" is good or bad, or using it themselves in a new sentence? Or even to pay attention to claims separated by more than a paragraph, especially as you yourself (this isn't to blame you, we're all like this) didn't do that with my words?
Different example of how language breaks away from original context: headlines defending serious professional misconduct by saying "they were just a few bad apples" as if the rest of that quotation fragment didn't exist.
Humans don't have the luxury of being able to mainline the entire internet like LLMs do, we skim and summarise, rhymes make things seem more true, all that kind of thing even before political tribalism turns this into a totem.
Those headlines you don't like? I'm sure I read somewhere that most people read only the headlines before commenting, and most of those who read more only read the first paragraph.
> The reality is that the word woke is a very clear ideology with well understood roots in Marxist oppressor/oppressed worldviews
I've read the Communist Manifesto and I call BS on that, and not just because of the 80 year gap between Das Kapital and Lead Belly. The closest connection I see between them is their incoherence in modern usage, specifically by those who have learned to use ["woke", "communist"] as generic insults. The idea of oppressor/oppressed worldviews goes back to at least Exodus, and that's an equally un-apt comparison.
Oh hey, "politically correct", as I recall, that was originally the right trying to demonise the left for supporting equality by memetic comparison to Soviet political officers…
> the Church of England is "woke" for having gender-neutral pronouns for God, that Lego is "woke" for having a new range of disabled figurines, that the National Trust is "woke" for saying that Henry VIII was disabled in later life, or that Disney is "woke" because of their support for LGBT issues, but I (apparently incorrectly) assumed those examples would be enough.
But how would any of these examples disprove the point? They're all related to some concept of an oppressed class vs oppressors where the oppressed class is defined biologically.
> I got the quote from Wikipedia
An understandable mistake. You shouldn't rely on Wikipedia to be reliable on anything related to wokeness, it's completely controlled by woke zealots. The quote you selected is actually about race, the fact that Wikipedia didn't make that obvious to you is a good reason to re-evaluate the reliability of that source.
Do we expect you to read material exhaustively: no, not normally, but if you're explicitly citing something to say "look! the word is used in different ways to what you're saying therefore it doesn't mean anything" then you ideally would verify the context of the sentence before using it.
> The idea of oppressor/oppressed worldviews goes back to at least Exodus
Indeed, wokeness does bear an uncanny resemblance to some aspects of Christianity. That's been noted by quite a few observers by now. There's a reinvention of original sin, the recent focus on transsexuality is the idea of a (gendered) soul separate from the body, the obsession with the supposed plight of the victim, etc. The psychological origins of this stuff are fascinating.
> Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you can't define woke' canard I keep seeing.
Trouble is, I said "[not] coherent enough to be tested" rather than "you can't define it"; and the comment you're replying to gives another definition that is a better pattern match for the following headlines:
"The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol" - Daily Mail, 22 April 2021
"UK builders go WOKE: Study finds three quarters of tradesmen discuss their feelings with colleagues while two thirds shun the fried breakfasts and nearly half say they are history buffs" - Daily Mail, 18 June 2022
Here's another definition of "woke":
"alert to racial prejudice and discrimination" — c. 1930s AAVE
But again, here's a completely different one, one that doesn't directly touch on race issues at all:
"to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures." — David Brooks, 2017
When a word means everything, it means nothing; when it shifts meaning under your feet as fast as "woke" has, it's as valuable for communicating as the Papiermark in the Weimar Republic was for trading.