This is what I read in my newspaper: "The ‘anti-woke’ backlash is no joke – and progressives are going to lose if they don’t wise up" (Guardian, 30 Jan 2020). So, you can be 'woke' or 'anti-woke'. All right, but what are we talking about?
· Technically, woke means “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”. Like “politically correct” before it, the word “woke” has come to connote the opposite of what it means.
· Woke is a political term of African American origin and it dates back at least to the 60s, but its mainstream ubiquity is a recent development. Fuelled by black musicians , social media and the Black Lives Matter movement, the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2017, by which time it had become as much a fashionable buzzword as a set of values.
· Today’s detractors often claim they are rejecting the word as a signifier of pretentiousness and “cultural and elitism”. Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming the victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status.
1. Connote - express or state indirectly; imply.
2. Ubiquity - the state of being (seeming) everywhere all the time.
3. Buzzword - a word or phrase that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context.
4. Detractor - someone who puts you down/finds fault with everything you say; someone who belittles/disparages the worth of what you say; someone who finds fault with everything you say.
5. Signifier -an indication of/symbol of
6. Pretentiousness - behaving in such a manner as to create a false appearance of great importance or worth
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