Remarkl
1 min readMar 18, 2023

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Words don't have meanings; people do. Lewis Carroll, whom the woke mob no longer reads because he was a DWEM - do they still use that acronym? - pointed out that words mean what we use them to mean. When we want to be understood by others, we choose words that our audience understands to mean what we are trying to communicate by using them. The word doesn't have some sort of sacred "meaning.” All that matters is that the utterer and audience have a shared understanding of what the utterer is trying to communicate.

So, when someone uses "woke" pejoratively about a person, they are communicating the idea that the person so labeled is overly focused on and activated by the beliefs such person considers themself woke for having. The question "What does 'woke' mean? is thus a rhetorical move, and not a good faith question. The good-faith question is "What do you mean by 'woke'?", a question with a fairly straightforward answer for anyone who is more interested in knowing it than in catching someone using it who has not thought much about linguistics and such.

That someone who uses a word largely for its connotation can't state on demand the boundaries of its denotation is no big deal. But the vapid claim that it does mean something is just another example of the hollow nature of woke rhetoric.

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Remarkl
Remarkl

Written by Remarkl

Self-description is not privileged.

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