Any first-year journalism student will tell you, probably via some unbearably showy use of a George Orwell quote, that the most fundamental rule of the craft is to avoid sloppy and inexact language. Leave as little room for a reader to misinterpret you as possible.
Thank gender-neutral God, then, for the word woke, which can be placed into any context without losing the laser-like focus of its completely comprehensible and enduring meaning.
For any readers who are mercifully unfamiliar with the evolution of the word, a quick primer: prior to the Trump era, the word’s use expanded from Black American activists to a wider use among progressives, broadly coming to mean alertness to structural oppression and social inequities. Now it means… whatever the hell you want it to, we guess.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of subjects that have been described as at risk of being destroyed by being “woke” in our national broadsheet.
- The Australian Defence Force.
- PwC.
- Capitalism.
- Fried chicken restaurant hiring policies.
- Victorian Labor.
- US corporate boardrooms.
- US military recruitment.
- That new Grease show.
- Hollywood writers.
- Re-writing old operas.
- The European Union.
- New Zealand tertiary institutions.
- Comedy.
- Climate protests.
- Billionaires.
- Corporations.
- An Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
- Corporations again.
- Easter Time buns.
- Stanford University.
- The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.
- The Oscars.
- Optus.
- All media in Australia not owned by News Corp.
- Self-hating Westerners.
- The $3 million cap on concessionally taxed balances.
- Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern.
- Penny Wong.
- The ABC on employees taking money from gambling companies.
- Gender-neutral God.
- The 21st century, and every state and federal government in Australia.
- Every state and federal government in Australia.
- Sydney Theatre Awards.
- M&M’s.
- Scooby-Doo.
- Jacinda Ardern again.
- Californian billionaires.
- New South Wales Labor.
- Millennials.
- The United Cup tennis tournament.
- US military training.
- Social media, corporate environmental, social and governance activists.
- The Wiggles.
- Blackrock CEO Larry Fink.
- ABC hiring practices.
- The US military again.
- Jamie Oliver.
- Truth-telling.
- Ambulance Victoria.
- UK culture, art and science.
- The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilisation.
- A direct attack on what [Winston] Churchill called “variety”.
- All this climate and identity madness.
- Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party.
This list takes us all the way back to August last year.
That month, the paper published the results of an Australian Institute study that concluded “half of us don’t know what ‘woke’ means” adding “only 12% of Australians knew what woke meant, wouldn’t describe themselves as woke and defined the term as ‘punishing people who don’t think the “right” things on social justice issues’”.
This did not stop the paper from putting out a piece headed “Why we must fight back against the forces of woke” a mere four days later.
Indeed, we can only admire the national broadsheet’s commitment to clarifying the subject for a confused public by giving them so many different uses for the word.
And of course the above article or any article that dare criticise the Australian.
Is it surprising that the negative space of that list is almost exclusively (powerless) grumpy old white guys, the paper’s key demographic? Nah.
Just as a matter of interest Andrew, how do you describe yourself?
I”m ‘woke’ Robert. Just woke up.
I’m one of the happy-go-lucky old white guys who don’t read the Australian.
‘Woke’ is just another lazy import from the US GOP media PR ecosystem; previously was ‘politically incorrect’ or anything the hard right didn’t like…..
Trump’s Republicans (and Sky/Newscorpse) can’t spell ‘politically incorrect’, but ‘woke’ is a neat little four-letter word their tiny bigoted minds can use.
Yes, PC seems to be out of fashion, though it means the same.
*politically correct
“Woke” as seen by the selectively comatose Limited News?
We just have to keep shouting that woke is a good thing, and means to be alert to and aware of the injustice of the social system in which we live. Don’t let the biased right commandeer and subvert the word. Let’s take the word back and keep using it ourselves in its proper way until we overwhelm all those who would use the word corruptly
Yep. That’s why I changed my name here
Too late for that, I fear. They, (the enemies of ‘doing the right thing’) will just reinvent or pervert the words and use them with no prior thinking involved.
Although isn’t it also the corruption of tense in (US black) ‘woke’ that permits the right to denigrate anyone with a social conscience as self-loathing/pretentious for so uncritically adopting such a bastardization of English, even if they’ve never used the term? ‘Woke’ is always used in fright, by the right, in Australia anyway. Be alarmed, not alert..! (isn’t that how it goes..?) But yes, the “war on woke” is just snobbery and racism.
The description of Black English as “bastardization” instead of just yet another variant, the insistence that non-standard English is substandard English, is just snobbery and racism.
Perhaps I should’ve put quote marks around “bastardization” as you have done, to make my meaning clearer. But was woke “just another variant” or more a deliberate disavowal of English (yes, itself a bastard), like punk misspelling? Perhaps that’s why the right have seized on it, and it now always sounds mocking of itself. Hard to ‘take it back’ when it was already a take.
‘Woke’ is double-plus ungood.