[coldtea]

>Leaving aside a debate over whether her work is a good match for “woke”, she very much cannot have been woke before woke was a thing

A game of being pedantic is always welcome:

She very well could have been "woke before woke was a thing", because "woke" as the parent means it in her case, refers to the modern usage (of like, 2 decades), not the original term of the 40s that might have preceeded her birth.

So take the parent's comment to mean:

"She was woke, in the modern, circa-2000s+ sense, before woke, in the modern circa-2000s+ sense was a thing, not in the 1950s namesake sense".

Similar to how somebody could have been a hipster (in the 2000s+ sense [1]) before a hipster was a thing (before 2000s), even if they have been born in the 70s. Sure, the term already existed before the 70s, but it referred to a different thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subcultu...

[dragonwriter]

The 1938 sense in which it was coin3d is exactly the sense of the 1950s and the sense that got ibcreased attention circa 2000s and catapulted to attention alongside BLM (which itself was a response to the same kind of even that the art in which the phrase was coined for responded to).

The only newer sense is the American Right’s use of the term to replace “political correctness” as an empty epithet for everything and everyone it disagrees with.

[coldtea]

Language grows organically, and the American right gets as much as the American left to define what a word means or how proponents of a movement or social fad are seen in practice (besides woke's standard definition is just "awake", if someone insists on the "original meaning")

So, one side could see woke in theory as a noble activist/social consciousness practice, which can not go wrong and helps liberate us all.

The other side might see woke in practice as intolerable virtue signalling and self-aggrandizing whose actions often border on farcical.

[dekhn]

Thanks; that's exactly what I meant. I leave these things out because I assume not everybody is pedantically waiting to call me out on a slight variation on their personal belief system.