That slippery word "woke"

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Bottom up natural evolution is fine, top down controls being imposed is not, and it's also self defeating as a counter-culture will arise to oppose it. We have a particularly salient example in the word "LatinX, which IIRC moves Latino voters several points towards Trump when used around them. That one is extra funny as it's not even pronounceable in Spanish, which is of course a gendered language to begin with.

It's not so much ill defined as it is actively resisting definition, as once defined it can be opposed. Everyone knows what is meant when someone refers to wokes or SJWs or the PC Police, it's been accurately satirized since at least the 90s, all of this "confusion" is just kabuki theater to gaslight those who complain. Of course, in light of recent developments in the US, all of that might finally backfire in a particularly spectacular way.

Like anything else these changes have to be judged on a case by case basis.

I do not remember any campaign to get rid of the expression “Indian Giver”. I had totally forgotten about it until I heard that old 1910 Fruitgum Company song decades later. It was natural evolution. Was it because people are less racist and realized the expression is racist or did it go away on its own like “groovy”?

“Aunt Jemima” was the result of a campaign. With a lot of these campaigns I always have to wonder if most members of the group involved are really offended by earlier term or if activists falsely assumed they would be as was the case with “Latin” and “autistic”(“person with autism” was in most mainstream style guidelines).

As previously said a main part of our definition wokeism is bullying into compliance. Which is exactly what people opposed to the term are doing. Even those who use the term for naferoius reasons don’t go around demanding others use the term.

One main critique of the term is that it is it ill defined. That is true of all new terms even those that eventually become canonized. That process is underway. The specific definition people such as me and Dox47 use we did not make up. Learned people have defined it that way. Canonized terms are misused all the time. Marxism is a prime example of a canonized term that has been misused for bad reasons for as long as I can remember. People will point out its misuse. There is offense taken by people mistakenly called marxist. Unlike woke there is no sustained effort to ban the term, no widespread offense taken be people who say they agree with marxist concepts.

Woke may have become canonized, an accepted colloquial term, or faded away like its predecessor SJW. We will never know. This hurts those offended by the term because bad actors see they can trigger people. This hurts those of us opposed to what we are describing because we are fighting off those trying to ban the term and the hit on our credibility by the validated bullies misusing the term. I highly suspect the refusal to propose another term for what we have described is not about banning that one word it is about banning our objections. I suspect it also hurts the cause of those who favor what we object to.

Even if we arrived at a consensus on a new word and somehow managed to force it into common usage, it would drift. Doesn't mean we can't have fun with an academic exercise here of course, if this thread can rightly be called fun.

I agree that some folks (not here) seem to wield too much power in making the rules about what language we should and shouldn't use. But I don't think it's just the lefties that manage to do that. What to do about others controlling our language, I don't know, but I suppose there are worse options than quietly refusing to recognise their edicts. For many, "woke" is an established pejorative. For others, it's quite the opposite. Maybe we could use the term "overwoke" to underscore the idea that wokeness is no bad thing in moderation.

It not just about demanding we do not use specific words. It is about demanding we comply with their redefinition of words. Right wingers did it first, left wingers did it more effectively.

When I was looking at Christmas cards early this month I saw one that had braille so that blind people can read it. I thought that was really good. But is it "woke"?

No. Nor are Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa cards. “Wokeism” is a view that looks at people not as individuals but as members of oppressor and oppressed groups, and demands compliance to that view and to defining words the way they way define them. That is beyond a simple card to do.