The linguistic warring over a perfectly good word
Originally published on Medium 3/12/23
First up, full disclosure, I am a linguist (not, by the way, a polyglot, a term many people confuse with linguist). I find language and words fascinating objects of study and am respectful, maybe even in awe of them. Respect, here, is not to imply that I worship words and that I buy into the prescriptivist argument that the language is going to hell and we need to be protective of it.
Meanings of words do change with circumstances and tastes and that process of change is built into why we use the languages we speak today, and not the languages our ancestors spoke 500 years ago. Shakespeare (if he’s the real deal) spoke and wrote something he called English and it’s not the same in so very many ways as the English of today. Even the English of today differs across the globe. Dialects abound.
Words change their meanings over time through a process of linguistic acculturation, a gradual process where the population of speakers, as a whole, agrees subtly and often unawares to adopt a change.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors to Live By described a creative process in which words acquire multiple meanings by attaching or extending metaphors to their core meanings.
Warm, for example, from an old Germanic root describing a physical sensation perceived by coming into close contact with a heat source took on the meaning of an emotional sensation sometime in the 1600’s. It’s then that the phrase heart-warming was first attested. Three hundred years later in the 20th century with baseball an up-and-coming phenomenon, it got applied to the phrase warm the bench, meaning to sit out some activity.
These new meanings for warm were derived as easily comprehended metaphors of heat producing warmth, respectively, in the chest and on the butt. Etymologists have huge fun with sorting all this out and it’s a testament to the universality of this process of change that the Oxford English Dictionary is a 20 volume, 28,000 page behemoth.
But there’s another mechanism by which words change and that’s by the deliberate efforts of individuals who don’t like the original meaning of a term. This hijacking or appropriation of a word’s meaning happens when influential and persistent people take it on themselves to change a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or vice versa. The key word here is influential, but we could extend that to mean powerful.
As common as word change is historically, it is not so easy to make it happen over a short term. You have to have clout and a big megaphone to do it. You can likely guess that in today’s world I’m referring to politicians and the internet. Maybe also celebrities on the internet.
People are creative in giving those they see as different from themselves pejorative and demeaning names. But the targets of those names, hearing themselves demeaned so often, get fed up and try to reclaim the words.
This is happening with the word queer, which I hated and felt humiliated by when it was aimed at me as a young gay man. But, low and behold, the LGBT movement of today has embraced the word and even added it to our ever growing acronym, now LGBTQ. Other words like the N-word are more difficult to redeem. It can’t be dislodged from the minds and tongues of people who have fused their racism into their minds and souls. It comes out as vicious and dangerous from the mouth or pen of a bigot.
But enough lead-in. The point of this article is to look at what’s happening with the word woke. It’s obvious this word is related to the verbs wake and awake, from the past participle forms woken and awoken.
It’s also, of course, the irregular past tense form of the verb wake, used matter-of-factly in sentences like, I woke up late today. But sometime, probably in the early to mid 20th century, Blacks, most likely in the South, began using the word as an adjective or adverb, not a verb. They coined this usage to express the state of being alert to prejudice and discrimination, as set out in the Wikipedia definition. Be woke, stay woke were used as warnings, as in:
Be careful when you deal with White people because they can get nasty or even violent if you don’t do what Jim Crow says.
If you or I are White and read that sentence, it might cause some discomfort and we might take exception to it, objecting, “I’m not like that and I have never been like that and it hurts me that you’re saying it.” In that kind of reaction, you are reiterating the argument of a lot of politically conservative White people who say it, but don’t mean it or actually live it.
Closet racists, maybe? If you’re a Black person listening to anyone denying their racism, you can’t always be sure of their sincerity. It’s the actions versus words thing.
If they could, closet racists would eliminate the word woke in its offending meaning from the English language entirely. They do under the pretext that it saves those innocent of racism the guilt that they don’t deserve. Being that eliminating the word is not possible, they want to stigmatize it or reassign it a new meaning. So, for example, in an essay under the title Wokeism is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult, Victor David Hanson attempts to do this.
Notice that he first elevates the term woke into the noun wokeism, a process called nominalization in linguistics. It’s hard to demonize an adjective. To make the case that a word should be avoided, it’s better to give it the skin and bones of a noun. Nouns you can poke sticks at and beat up, adjectives not so much. (I’m doing the metaphorical extension thing here, by the way.) Having created wokeism as a new term, Hanson lays out his thesis in his subtitle:
Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and — if need be — of those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda.
Wow! Who knew that a word with synonyms like observant, careful, wary (Be woke! = Be careful!) could be so insidious and so powerful? I’m not going to go into his arguments. You have a link to the article above, if you’re interested in exploring his reasoning.
Just a side note though. Adding the -ism suffix almost seems to elevate the word to another level of “nouniness” over and above wokeness, also a noun. Kind of like super-duper wokeness. In Hanson’s argument he infuses woke with malignant and evil overtones, which, by extension, he implicitly levels on the human beings using the term. It’s personal with him, not academic.
What’s more interesting than the article itself is the reaction of other readers to the article, some supportive of it, some dismissive. From the standpoint of linguistic change, when a word’s meaning is not agreed on by the whole community of the language’s speakers, it’s chances of entering the general lexicon are diminished, or its use will be stigmatized and marginalized, maybe even criminalized.
A language and its cache of words represents an unstated acknowledgement or agreement among its language community that we will understand and use it in the same way. If our understanding of a word is ambiguous or contentious, we likely will avoid using it because our listeners/readers won’t be sure of its underlying metaphors or the implications we intend by it. I find the word sanction like that, and so avoid using it. I’m not at all confident that my listener/reader sees the same ambiguity I do, and so might misunderstand me.
The commenters exemplify this problem. Those supporting Hanson commented that wokeism is tantamount to “COMMUNISM” (his caps) of the sort that dominates the “governments of New York and California.” [California, by the way, is the state where Hanson works and probably lives. He’s at Stanford at the Hoover Institution.]
Another commenter declares wokeism to be a form of “Gnosticism” in which they know better than us, and use their power to coerce and marginalize the middle class. Another has it as a “religion, a disease of the mind,” spreading here but being resisted in more enlightened countries, like Poland and Hungary. It’s like “1930s Germany or Cambodia under Pol Pot.” And then a gay man claims that the term unjustly validates the T in GLBT, people he feels “disgusted by.” He says trans people are afflicted by a “mental disease.” You can see the power that adding the -ism suffix gives to the noun. You probably would see a different set of associations with wokeness, not so ideologically based.
Then after all the comments affirming the article, four commenters criticized it. One wrote that the essay was an “attempted indoctrination by White Christian Nationalists” and offered the advice to “stop obsessing over what you disagree with. stfu.” Another wrote that Hanson’s “propaganda reveals an agenda of lies, ignorance, fear and hate.” He called Hanson an “embarrassment and insult to Stanford.”
Another summarizes her argument: “Being “woke” only implies that you are no longer sleepwalking through your life.” And finally, one flatly says: “The Wikipedia article on this subject is much more comprehensive and accurate.” They’re denying the propriety of Hanson labeling it an -ism, and calling him out as a closet racist.
So we’ve got a heated discourse based in competing ideological frames, though Hanson and his supporters would likely deny that they’re arguing on suspect ideological grounds. Fighting ideologically is no way to build consensus, so the prognosis for woke staying in the language in its original meaning is iffy. It may or may not make it. The outcome will be like the war — sorry special military operation — going on between Ukraine and Russia, to be decided sometime in the next generation.
In the meantime, if people require another word to describe the need to stay alert to the dangers of people they don’t like or trust, they’ll come up with one. Listen for it to come from your favorite rapper, maybe. They’re great at coining new words.