Oxford English Dictionary extends its definition of the word 'woke'

Language is flexible, and definitions can easily turn on a moment or a movement. Change can grip even the most literal of terms: adjectives can go from functional one day to charged the next. Which is what has happened to “woke” — a word that once invoked the state after sleep but this week officially entered the Oxford English Dictionary in its socially conscious, online-friendly 2017 form.

To recap: to be “woke” is to be sensitive to social issues and how they shape the world we live in, but moreover it suggests that you will call them out, noisily, online and offline. It implies a distrust of elites, imparts exasperation with the status quo, and connotes action and change. The wakeful cohorts tend to be young, and — obviously — Left-leaning. Incidentally, the term has shades of entitlement: ultimately, you can only “wake up” to the existence of deeply etched social issues if they haven’t really affected you much until now.

Furthermore, the term is complicated by the allegation that it has been appropriated from the Black Lives Matter movement. “Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better,” explains the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s blog. “Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement [and] became a word of action.”

Perhaps sensitive of this, the OED justified the word’s addition to this year’s book with characteristic straightness. “By the mid-20th century,” it notes, “woke had been extended figuratively to refer to being ‘aware’ or ‘well-informed’ in a political or cultural sense.” Though Urban Dictionary’s version is less generous, calling it “a state of perceived intellectual superiority one gains by reading The Huffington Post”.

Inclusion in the OED signifies a word’s transition from counterculture to mainstream. And woke’s shift has undeniably been in process for a while. But perhaps the definitive moment of its evolution into a buzzword for (gently) entitled modern activism was Brexit.

Just over a year ago to the day, the country woke up — literally — to the news that we had voted to leave the European Union, and 48 per cent of us also woke up — figuratively — to the idea that the country was mired in a battle of ideals. The top line, Leave versus Remain, disguised a rather more opaque clash of ideologies which are still being thrashed out, and tripped off a summer of protest and prevarication, led mainly by the “woke”.

Inevitably, the dismal summer became a dismal autumn, which became a desperate winter, when the world woke up — literally — to the news that Trump had been anointed President and liberals woke up — figuratively — to the reality that they definitely hadn’t called this, and they definitely didn’t know who or what to call on now.

2016 crescendoed into a loud backlash against Trump: the liberal echo chambers roared while the fake news sites catered to the illiberal versions of the same cacophony. Memes lampooned the President and rumours impugned his campaign; zeitgeist television shows such as Saturday Night Live — the distillation of woke entertainment — satirised his verbal ticks and physical curiosities.

As the year turned, we remained wakeful: in January, women marched in pussy hats, so-called after Trump’s infamous instruction to grab women indelicately. Woke boys — or, woke baes — marched with them, determined to show wakefulness does not discriminate on gender grounds.

It was a frantic few months, although not everything that is political is, by definition, woke. And so when the general election was called, it seemed like it could mark a settled, sleepy period. Certainly, the early stages of the campaign had a somnambulant feel: no one seemed very invigorated by the prospect of going to the polls at all, and many hypothesised that turnout would be abysmal. Politicians seemed only to be going through the motions: the Tories kicked off on a vow to be “strong and stable”, Corbyn didn’t seem to have kicked off at all.

And then, suddenly, the electorate animated. Pundits did not predict it, though if they’d been more sensitive, they might have realised the restfulness of the preceding months was unlikely to fall suddenly dormant. Defying expectations from both camps, Jeremy Corbyn animated a youth base that is typically too apathetic to turn up on election day. It is estimated that turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was as high as 64 per cent for this election, making it the highest turnout since 67 per cent voted in 1992, and ended two decades of disproportionately low turnout in that cohort. They had woken up and roared, and in the mean time got in the way of a neat Tory majority. This in turn drove May towards the DUP, and ignited change.org after a Facebook page about how to agitate.

So it is perhaps poetic that, on Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn (at 68, a notable exception to the rule that the “woke” tend to be young) addressed the unwashed and underslept crowds on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, which is where many bereft Remoaners found out last year that we would be leaving the EU. He quoted Shelley, while the crowd retorted with choruses of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.

In a year, the woke have acquired an official conference, a protest song and a namecheck in the Oxford English Dictionary. No one’s sleeping for the foreseeable future.

@phoebeluckhurst