It has been obvious to me for a long time that the people using the term woke now don't even have a concrete definition of the term, but I was still blown away by the sheer stupidity and obliviousness of one of those right wing people posting about how they are not woke, they are awake [to the world around them].
I use the term to describe the need and moral entitledness of modifying language as a reaction and treatment to injustice and to the intended normalization of every sexual practice existing.
As such I don't see these two examples as contradicting.
One side uses woke (awake) as acting to the world in "ingesting" it in language, while the other side thinks of being awake in seeing that the world doesn't actually work that way. They both think they are "awake", they just disagree how and what "the world" is.
That wasn't my intention. :-) I just wanted to point out that it is not "sheer stupidity and obliviousness", but a useful distinction.
> It once was just a mostly fun little word
I think part of that issue is, that the term didn't exist here when it only meant that. Was it a "in black subgroup" thing? Or was this known to a wider audience?
> excellent bit of evidence in favor of my point
Can you explain this to counteract my obliviousness? So you see ziml77 as an example of left and me of right, or what?
I'm not sure exactly what the question is here, but I'm comfortable saying that the definition I gave isn't a "later" thing. It's the historical/factual origin story of the word. As with many cultural things, Black folks will often invent something, and then it gets appropriated because it's cool (for better or worse).
What you're saying, if sincere, is extremely late stage. I'm very comfortable with:
It was solely "our" thing for a while, I mean I can recall that usage even before the year 2000. Somewhere MUCH after that it gets a little bit more popular (e.g. either due to or more likely downstream of the Childish Gambino song Redbone?) and (perhaps likely to more white liberal folks using it) begins to "feel" more concrete than before, despite not actually much being so.
And perhaps more importantly, IMHO "the right" is always desperate to find codewords they can use to put down minority groups without obvious slurs. "Woke" fits the bill pretty well, especially since it evokes AAVE.
Before your comment I did not know that "woke" means something else then political behaviour of the left. I also didn't had in mind that it comes from the word "awake". I here it exclusively used in the sense I described. We don't have much black subgroups here, as far as I know, and it takes some while before terms cross the Atlantic.
Sorry that we are all misusing your term. But I think that's not a political thing, that's just language. Foreign term introduced in our language almost never mean exactly, what they meant in the origin language.
The "right" I consider myself part of (conservatism, not far right), doesn't have something against minorities. It's more resentment against "minority issues" being used to push orthogonal left ideologies. Whenever "the left" introduces some law to "free the oppressed minorities", the first people crying against it are always the interest groups of the minorities themselves. That's the case from disabled people to people with actual sexual disorders. They never want weird prescription and political flamewars, they want actual help.
Yes, appreciate it -- and I respect the need to get into it about smaller particular annoyances of the left, etc.
But again, it only takes a little poking around outside of ones bubble to see the nebulousness of "Woke". E.g.video clips of literally any right, or perhaps center person confronted with "No, seriously, actually define it" ALWAYS crumble.
