Do you like waking up? Yeah, me neither. I prefer that all my waking be done strictly in the past tense, i.e. to be woke.
I’m looking at my drafts bin and I have a lot of stuff here that I never finished and never will finish. I thought I’d turn some of these ideas into a more casual blogging. How do you like this format? How do I like this format?
I have a draft dated to 2023, whose premise is “a linguistic analysis of ‘woke’”. Basically, I would use google trends and time-constrained google searches to identify the historical trajectory of the word and its meaning. I’ve done this a few times before, e.g. tracing the history of “No homo”.
The problem with this idea, is that it requires work. I do not find research to be intrinsically rewarding, and I don’t think readers would appreciate it enough to justify it.
According to my notes, the search interest for “woke” first spiked in 2013. My notes say:
I couldn’t associate this with a single event, but there was a book titled “Woke Up Lonely”, and several songs titled “Woke Up a Millionaire”, “I Woke Up in a Car”, and “Woke Up This Morning”. None of these are what we’re interested in.
The second spike in search interest occurred in 2017. My notes stop there, just short of learning anything.
In my recollection, in 2017 you find news stories that are specifically explaining “woke” as the hip new slang. I remember thinking: when mainstream newspapers have started writing explainers, that’s a sign that either the hip new slang hasn’t been hip for a long time, or won’t be for much longer.
I was primarily interested in exploring the AAVE roots of the term “woke”, and commenting on the racist undertones of how conservatives have adopted it as their insult du jour. (Is it even necessary to comment on the racist undertones of conservatism? They’re racist overtones at this point.) But my methodology just wasn’t going to turn up the early history. You would learn more from reading Wikipedia.
As I see it, when “woke” is used as an insult by conservatives against liberals, the underlying logic is quite similar to the phrase, “Wake up, sheeple!” When we use that phrase today, we’re not literally telling the sheeple to wake up, we are instead mocking a persona who thinks themselves so much wiser than the “sheeple” around them. Likewise, when conservatives call us “woke”, they’re mocking a self-congratulatory leftist persona who thinks it’s cool to call themselves “woke”.
But the insult kind of misses the mark, because “woke” was not previously in wide circulation among leftists. “Woke” has been attested in AAVE since the 1930s, and it was adopted by some BLM activists in the 2010s. That caused the OED to add it in 2017, which is probably where conservatives heard about it, late to the party.
“Woke” is exceedingly weak as an insult, so it doesn’t surprise me that some leftists have since adopted it for themselves. But YMMV on whether this is appropriate, given its history as an AAVE term.
i like “wokester”
I probably shouldn’t comment, as an old white guy, but I will anyway.
As I understand it, the term woke refers to being aware of your surrounding, who is watching what you are doing, and to try to avoid drawing attention to yourself by doing stupid or attention attracting things from people in authority (or believe they are in authority). I think it has expanding in meaning a bit in recent years to include being aware of other people who may be attracting the attention of authorities, and maybe warning them. Either way, it is not anti-authority, it is a survival tactic when dealing with authorities who operate without sufficient oversight (which includes most local police forces).
What is the flip side of this? I guess it’s displaying the privilege of being able to do stupid things and things which will grab the attention of authorities, with the certain knowledge that they will be forgiven, or given a slap on the wrist.
I see woke used as an insult as a way to brag about their privilege. It’s a shorthand to say, “I’m privileged enough to be able to do things like speed, shop-lift, even get into brawls, and at most get a fine. You are woke, meaning you worry about jail time, or even being deported, if you do any of these things. I can get away with murder, while you worry about being sent to jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread.”
The other possibility is that it’s just proof that any word can become an insult if spoken/written in a derogatory manner. I think about how the word “gay” was used as an insult in my childhood, and the only association we understood when we were eight was that other people used it in a derogatory manner. Is the average Trump voter stuck at the mental age of eight?
When I hear professional Republicans use “woke” as a slur, I guess that the word has no meaning itself. Instead, the listener provides the meaning of [something I dislike] and thinks, “Hey, the speaker agrees with me.”
There’s a difference between an insult that is supposed to make someone feel bad, vs one that is more about signalling values to the users allies. Woke is definitely the more virtue signalling side of things
Woke up New by The Mountain Goats was 2006?
“I’m looking at my drafts bin and I have a lot of stuff here that I never finished and never will finish. I thought I’d turn some of these ideas into a more casual blogging.”
I have a lot of stuff in my drafts too, which I feel like “in an ideal world I would spend more time on this and make it better” but I know I’ll never have time for that, so sometimes I just publish them anyway. Life is too short to leave posts in the drafts folder! Probably readers have no idea which posts those are. No one is sitting around saying “hmm she should have spent more time on this and it would have been way better.”
ALSO Beyonce had a song “Flawless” in 2013 with the lyrics “I woke up like this.” I think that could explain some of your google 2013 data.
Oh, I scrapped almost everything that was in the draft. What I did was I looked at the draft and thought, “What did I actually want to say with this research project? I should just say that instead of taking the long way there.”