Words and meanings: Woke
Someone I follow on Twitter recently posted:
If your argument against something is that it is "woke" I will assume that you are so ignorant you cannot create a cogent argument and I shall feel no obligation to respond to your "claim".
I first heard people using "woke" as an adjective or a noun about 6-7 years ago, and so I looked it up. It was US slang, and so I thought a US dictionary would be authoritative. So I tried Merriam-Webster:
woke adjective
woker; wokest
Definition of woke
chiefly US slang
: aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
The problem is, however, that about 4 out of 5 people who use the word "woke" as an adjective seem to use it in contexts that indicate that they think it is a bad thing.
Do they therefore think it is important to be passively inattentive to important facts and issues, or to be actively attentive to unimportant facts and issues?
What puzzles me is that so many people who claim to be Christians seem to be among those who think that being "woke" is a bad thing. The graphic on the right seems to spell out the meaning according to the Merriam-Webster definition, and it seems to me that the people most likely to think that those are bad things would be more influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand than the Bible, and Ayn Rand was a hard-core atheist who preached the virtues of selfishness.
If there is to be any meaningful communication, there is ssurely some obligation for those who think it is bad to be "woke" to explain why (other than simply pointing to the works of Ayn Rand) they think it is bad to be "well-informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble and kind."
I am an Orthodox Christian, and every year during Great Lent, Orthodox Christians pray to God to make them woke, in the words of the Lenten Prayer of St Ephraim:
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.
Idle talk is talk that is the opposite of thoughtful and well-informed.
And much of the talk that I hear about "woke" nowadays seems to be thoughtless and ill-informed.
And much "talk" on social media seems to be idle talk in that it is thoughtless and ill-informed. So many tweets are incomprehensible because people are reluctant to state clearly the underlying assumptions on which they are based. People use terms like "woke" and "woke issues" without saying what they mean by "woke" or specifying what the "woke issues" are, or saying what they think is "woke" about them.
And so often, on social media, as someone else put it, "I feel like I’m seeing the aftermath of some discourse here." People respond to something you say as if it were part of another conversation altogether, one that you haven't heard.
So perhaps "woke" is another word that has been skunked, used to mean so many different and incompatible things that it has lost all meaning, so that you need to ask people to explain what they mean by it every time they use it.
Anyway, it now seems to be getting replaced by a new term with a similar meaning -- "based".
But that seems to be a whole nother can of worms.
So in the mean time I repeat what my Twitter friend said:
If your argument against something is that it is "woke" I will assume that you are so ignorant you cannot create a cogent argument and I shall feel no obligation to respond to your "claim".
If your argument against something is that it is "woke" I will assume that you are so ignorant you cannot create a cogent argument and I shall feel no obligation to respond to your "claim".
I first heard people using "woke" as an adjective or a noun about 6-7 years ago, and so I looked it up. It was US slang, and so I thought a US dictionary would be authoritative. So I tried Merriam-Webster:
woke adjective
woker; wokest
Definition of woke
chiefly US slang
: aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
The problem is, however, that about 4 out of 5 people who use the word "woke" as an adjective seem to use it in contexts that indicate that they think it is a bad thing.
Do they therefore think it is important to be passively inattentive to important facts and issues, or to be actively attentive to unimportant facts and issues?
What puzzles me is that so many people who claim to be Christians seem to be among those who think that being "woke" is a bad thing. The graphic on the right seems to spell out the meaning according to the Merriam-Webster definition, and it seems to me that the people most likely to think that those are bad things would be more influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand than the Bible, and Ayn Rand was a hard-core atheist who preached the virtues of selfishness.
If there is to be any meaningful communication, there is ssurely some obligation for those who think it is bad to be "woke" to explain why (other than simply pointing to the works of Ayn Rand) they think it is bad to be "well-informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble and kind."
I am an Orthodox Christian, and every year during Great Lent, Orthodox Christians pray to God to make them woke, in the words of the Lenten Prayer of St Ephraim:
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.
Idle talk is talk that is the opposite of thoughtful and well-informed.
And much of the talk that I hear about "woke" nowadays seems to be thoughtless and ill-informed.
And much "talk" on social media seems to be idle talk in that it is thoughtless and ill-informed. So many tweets are incomprehensible because people are reluctant to state clearly the underlying assumptions on which they are based. People use terms like "woke" and "woke issues" without saying what they mean by "woke" or specifying what the "woke issues" are, or saying what they think is "woke" about them.
And so often, on social media, as someone else put it, "I feel like I’m seeing the aftermath of some discourse here." People respond to something you say as if it were part of another conversation altogether, one that you haven't heard.
So perhaps "woke" is another word that has been skunked, used to mean so many different and incompatible things that it has lost all meaning, so that you need to ask people to explain what they mean by it every time they use it.
Anyway, it now seems to be getting replaced by a new term with a similar meaning -- "based".
But that seems to be a whole nother can of worms.
So in the mean time I repeat what my Twitter friend said:
If your argument against something is that it is "woke" I will assume that you are so ignorant you cannot create a cogent argument and I shall feel no obligation to respond to your "claim".