Will the word ever recover?

A “healthy expansion of moral concern”? A “new strain of ideological virus”? A “dictatorship of the well-meaning and pure of heart”? A “doctrine of opportunism”? These are the wildly different ways people in the 1990s described that linguistic hot potato called political correctness. The descriptions could well be among the jungle of clashing accounts we find today — but for wokeness.

The path to both political correctness and wokeness was paved with good intentions — but the call for an awareness of social justice concerns and racial inequities has now been weaponised into a tool of division by critics.

“Our country will be woke no longer,” US President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address. “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad.”

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Trump’s “war on woke” was a driving force of his election campaign and has hit overdrive since his inauguration. Closer to home, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton claims voters have had enough of the “woke agenda”.

The origin of woke 

Woke is old — you’ll find an entry for it in Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words from the Fourteenth Century. 

For many years, woke and woken have been rivals, much like wrote and written. Fluctuating forms like these have always given off different social signals. In his Short Introduction to English Grammar of 1762, bishop Robert Lowth condemned what he described as “common mistakes” such as “it was wrote” (instead of “it was written”) — and yet, in a letter to his wife he stated: “My last was wrote in a great hurry”. 

Pinpointing first sightings of words like woke is notoriously difficult — even today expressions can live and breathe in speech long before they happen to be written down. Woke with the meaning “alert to racial and social injustices” was certainly around in the early 1900s. One of its early appearances was in Lead Belly’s 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys”, where the lyrics expose the deep racial injustices of the American legal system — “best stay woke”, he warns.

This use of woke draws from the earliest meaning of the verb to wake — “be alert, vigilant”, often associated with watching over others. But contemporary dictionaries now acknowledge the modern negative uses that characterise such alertness as doctrinaire, self-righteous, even harmful. Woke has turned into a useful rhetorical stick to beat political adversaries with — and an effective strategy to short-circuit any serious debate.

From stamp of approval to slogan of contempt

During her recent Screen Actors Guild awards speech Jane Fonda acknowledged the double-edged sword that the term woke has now become: “And make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn”.

So, in one camp are the champions of human rights and empathetic advocates for change, and in the other are the stony-faced “wokeniks”, corrupters of language at the forefront of an assault on free speech and common sense.  

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It has long been established that words are more likely to take on negative meanings than they are favourable ones — bad meanings will drive out good. According to Gresham’s Law of Semantic Change, meanings shift to accommodate a dimmer view of human nature. And the linguistic evidence is compelling. Hovering negative senses will dominate, eventually quashing all other senses. It’s hardly surprising — quite simply, people won’t risk being misunderstood. 

Evidence of the decline is that woke the adjective has been fully “nouned”. In addition to wokeness, we now find wokeism and wokery. The ending -ness might be fairly neutral but -ism and -ery are anything but — both suffixes give off a sense of sneering contempt.

Can woke shed its baggage?

Hundreds of words have met the same fate as wokeness. Look at the disparaging senses that now dominate social justice warrior. It didn’t take snowflake long to shift from a positive term celebrating a person’s individuality and potential to a sneering term highlighting their emotional fragility and sense of entitlement. Even orthodoxy is now often used as a contemptuous label for the beliefs of others.

So can woke shed its negative connotations and return to its original intent? Sadly, words rarely climb out of the abyss once they’ve declined. Attitude is a rare example; its combination of confidence, boldness and get-up-and-go is now touted as desirable, at least by some. But this shift has come on the back of significant societal change. It is more likely that we’ll acquire a new word, one that doesn’t have the negative baggage — yet.

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