[Ads-l] woke, wokeness

Sat Mar 3 21:30:09 UTC 2018

Can anyone confirm the claim in a recent New Yorker piece (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost-giant-of-american-literature) on William Kelley that “woke” is a word that Kelley is "credited with first committing to print”, in "a 1962 Op-Ed that Kelley published in the New York Times” entitled “If you’re woke, you dig it”.  (KIeThe OED’s entry for “woke” indeed cites this piece—

1962   N.Y. Times Mag. 20 May 45   If you're woke, you dig it... Woke.., well-informed, up-to-date (‘Man I'm woke’).

although they note that (pace Schulz’s New Yorker’s article) Kelley’s NYT article wasn't an Op-Ed but something for the Times Magazine. I’d say the current use of “be woke” is better paraphrased by Kelley’s “dig” than by the OED's “be well-informed, up-to-date”. 

LH   

P.S.  Just found a .pdf version of that 1962 piece by Kelley on “woke” and other instances of “Negro idioms”:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/05/20/140720532.pdf

P.P.S.  Schulz points out that Kelley is also notable for writing a novel, _dem_, whose epigraph is given in IPA.

> On Mar 3, 2018, at 3:20 PM, Barretts Mail <mail.barretts at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Theresa Fisher asked on 19 May 2016 (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2016-May/142494.html <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2016-May/142494.html>) about “woke” and Garson O’Toole responded the next day (same link) with an article by Charles Pulliam-Moore (https://splinternews.com/how-woke-went-from-black-activist-watchword-to-teen-int-1793853989 <https://splinternews.com/how-woke-went-from-black-activist-watchword-to-teen-int-1793853989>).
> 
> Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woke <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woke>) has this as Anglo-American slang with citations in 2014 and 2016: Alert and aware of what is going on, especially in social justice contexts.
> 
> The English Oxford Living Dictionaries (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/woke <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/woke>) give it as US informal: Alert to injustice in society, especially racism
> 
> The informality appears to be lifting rapidly. Today, the The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html>) discusses “woke capital” and “wokeness” without any definition of either.
> 
> The Rise of Woke Capital
> by Ross Douthat
> —— 
> Instead of the Treaty of Detroit we have, if you will, the Peace of Palo Alto, in which a certain kind of virtue-signaling on progressive social causes, a certain degree of performative wokeness, is offered to liberalism and the activist left pre-emptively, in the hopes that having corporate America take their side in the culture wars will blunt efforts to tax or regulate our new monopolies too heavily.
> 
> In certain ways the Peace of Palo Alto won’t be fully tested until the next time the Democrats hold real power, when we’ll get to find out whether the left’s antimonopoly forays have any follow-through, whether more than a token portion of the Trump corporate tax cuts will get rolled back — or whether corporate wokeness will suffice as a concession to the new spirit of liberalism, enabling the easy post-1980s relationship between corporate America and the Democratic Party to endure.
> 
> Their wokeness buys them cover when liberalism is in power, and any backlash only helps prop up a G.O.P. that has their back when it comes time to write our tax laws.
> 
> The win-win scenario for woke capitalism can’t last forever.
> ——
> 
> Rather than “wokeness”, I think I would have chosen “wakedness” or “wokedness”; however the internet is filled with hits proving me lost and demonstrating that “woke” as a concept is strong enough to push forward with its own paradigm. Here are two lexicographical links (no entry in the OLD):
> 
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wokeness <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wokeness>
> https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wokeness <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wokeness>
> 
> Benjamin Barrett
> Formerly of Seattle, WA
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org