From the desirable to the derogatory

I was once asked by an editor to remove some sentences from something I had written because these might offend wokers. Wokers are people who apparently spend their time sucking everything positive out of the word ‘woke’ and packing it with something offensive. 

I was once asked by an editor to remove some sentences from something I had written because these might offend wokers. Wokers are people who apparently spend their time sucking everything positive out of the word ‘woke’ and packing it with something offensive. 

Woke “refers to an awareness of abstract but powerful sociopolitical arrangements that disempower too many people,” according to the linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter. 

But few words have made the journey from the desirable to the derogatory with such speed in recent times. 

Wokeness was politically on the Left, an act of inclusivity, respect for other cultures and ethnic variations; a warning against assuming the majority is automatically right. It showed support for the marginalised and that cannot be a bad thing. 

But then those at the other end of the political spectrum began to ridicule it. In an article he wrote last year, the RSS leader Ram Madhav said, “Wokeism is an undefinable trait of being an anarchist all the time… Woke theory is that the minority opinion is of greater value than that of the majority.” Politics corrupts language, and vice versa. 

Humpty Dumpty had said this might happen: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” 

I suspect ‘woke’ struggles owing to the influence of another contemporary phenomenon, ‘cultural appropriation.’ Years ago, a friend of our son from college, a German, said she loved a saree. My wife presented her with one, but then the student became uncertain. Did we mind that she wore this Indian garment or would we be upset at the cultural appropriation? We wouldn’t be insulted, my wife assured her, only happy (now that we were forced to think about it).