The Twisting Tale of ‘Woke' Is the Story of the English Language

New York Times

20-02-2025

For all the workout it's gotten in the last couple of years, you would be pardoned for thinking of the term 'woke' as relatively new. Chances are you first heard it within the last 10 years and change. I did. However, seemingly novel words often turn out to have a longer history: 'Anyhoo' may feel relatively modern but is actually attested in the United States as early as 1924, and appears in the Cole Porter song 'Where's Louie' in 1939. 'Woke' goes a ways back, too, and it stretches into the future, continuing to evolve in what feels like real time. The way that change unfolds has a lot to teach us about both language and our cultural moment.
'Woke' has often been reported (including by me, previously) as first appearing in print in 1962, in an article about 'Negro' slang published by The Times. But my colleague Emily Berch has recently brought to my attention that in 1940 the Negro United Mine Workers, a West Virginia labor union, issued a statement that included the lines, 'We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.'
The blues singer Huddie Ledbetter gave us the first 'woke' on record — pun intended — on a 1938 recording of his song 'Scottsboro Boys,' urging us to 'stay woke.' 'Staying woke' meant understanding that there are larger forces operating to keep power unequally distributed in our society, disfavoring especially the poor and people of color. Genevieve Larkin, the wisenheimer social climber in the film 'Gold Diggers of 1937,' might not have known the term, but she was getting at something similar when she said, 'It's so hard to be good under the capitalistic system!'
Why 'woke' rather than 'woken'? Black English tends to collapse the past tense and the participle forms of verbs. Textbook English is present tense 'sink,' past tense 'sank' and participle 'sunk.' Black English is just 'sink' and 'sunk,' a simplification that's been catching on more broadly for some time. (An example is in an NPR interview from a few years ago: 'Once they sunk that investment into, you know, one of these anchors, they are very reluctant to let go.')
Or think about people who have been swindled. You could say they had been taken, but one might also hear it described as having been took. 'Spoke' can replace 'spoken' even in natively written, formal English texts. 'James gives two more examples of patience,' I read in a sermon from the First Presbyterian Church of Unionville. 'First, he had spoke of the farmer. Now he speaks first of the prophets, and then of a particular person, Job.'
'Woke' for 'woken,' then, just follows a general pattern in how verbs seem to want to work in English.
In the early 2010s, amid what the journalist Matt Yglesias has titled 'the Great Awokening,' the word jumped the fence from Black English into wider usage, joining a class of words we could call mainstream demotic — slang that becomes what we think of as legitimate words. Other examples include 'diss,' 'legit' and 'brunch' (which for the record traces back to 1896).
Quickly after its embrace, however, 'woke' underwent what linguists call pejoration, by which a positive or neutral word takes on a negative meaning. In this case, it went from referring to those who possess leftist political awareness to those who believe anyone who lacks that enlightenment should be punished, shunned or ridiculed.
Pejoration comes as no great surprise; as words change over time, they are more likely to pejorate than to ameliorate (more research is needed as to what this says about human nature). 'Reduce' in its original meaning meant to take back to, and could refer both to increase and decrease. In 1665, a writer described the ancient Romans in Britain as having 'reduced the natural inhabitants from their Barbarism to the Society of civil Life.'
What was surprising about the pejoration of 'woke,' however, was how quickly it happened. The expression 'politically correct' emerged among Communists in the 1930s and became common in the mainstream as both a term of praise and as an ironic comment on adherence to party dogma. Only in the late 1980s did it become a slur from the right against the left, hissingly abbreviated to 'P.C.'
'Woke,' in contrast, became a slur within a mere few years of its appearance in the mainstream. This was partly due to the fact that race issues were so contentious in the late 2010s, but anyone who thinks race wasn't being discussed hotly in the late 1980s either wasn't there or was living quite hermetically. The more important difference was social media, which propagates and even transforms terms more rapidly than broadcasting and print.
The transformation of 'woke' up through that point has already been documented. The reason to revisit the subject now is that we have lately entered a new phase in the word's evolution, one that seems to turn its original meaning on its head, but instead finds a deeper logic.
The phrase 'the woke right' started appearing with frequency in 2022 but became especially well entrenched after an essay on Substack late last year by the satirist Konstantin Kisin. Rather than applying specifically to the concerns of the left, 'woke' is now being used to refer more generally to a conspiracy-focused and punitive orientation to social change.
The journalist Andrew Doyle has noted that the ''woke right' is a kind of ideological Doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts.' The author James Lindsay describes how 'the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there's a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading.'
This third phase of the life cycle of 'woke' demonstrates a different kind of turn: semantic broadening. Centuries ago, the word 'dog' referred to one particular strain of canine while 'hound' was the general word for the species; over time, 'dog' broadened while 'hound' narrowed. 'Business' first referred to being busy but broadened to refer to the 'busy' work of capitalist enterprises.
So when the scholar and editor Paul Gottfried insists, 'There is no 'woke right' any more than there are Burkean Marxists, Black Dixiecrats, or patriarchal feminists. Attempts to create such unlikely fusions of opposites border on the ridiculous,' he misses how semantic broadening works. 'Woke right' gets at an orientation that the illiberal strains of left and right share, whether focused on the left's 'The Man' or the right's 'deep state.'
This is how language change happens, and it is happening especially quickly these days in the language we use to talk about culture and politics. The language is morphing to an extent hard to process day to day.
Here is a useful comparison. Many students have learned the opening lines of Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales': 'Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote' and so on. It's easy enough to get the meaning, but that's just luck. Shortly after those lines is language more typical of Chaucer's Middle English: 'And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes to ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes.' It meant 'And pilgrims start to seek foreign shores to distant shrines, known in various lands' but almost might as well be Swedish to us. That unfamiliarity is the residual effect of six centuries of gradual linguistic change.
Now take this sentence: 'The woke right oppose D.E.I. programs, the conception of 'trans' as an identity, gender-affirming care for minors, and terms referring to groups such as Latinx and BIPOC.' These unfamiliar uses of 'woke,' 'D.E.I.' and 'trans' and the novel terms 'gender-affirming,' 'Latinx' and 'BIPOC' would not strike someone from even just 15 years ago as Swedish, but would be nearly as incomprehensible. Much of our English vocabulary is in a kind of hypercharge of late, and this is why 'woke' has seemed to be such a slippery shape-shifter.
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By the way, a fast-changing language gives rise to a lot of questions about what's correct and what's not. I recommend not only reading Ellen Jovin, the polyglot and language expert who wrote the excellent book 'Rebel With a Clause,' but also bookmarking the documentary about her national tour as the guru of the 'Grammar Table.' The film's New York premiere is on March 4.