Any first-year journalism student will tell you, probably via some unbearably showy use of a George Orwell quote, that the most fundamental rule of the craft is to avoid sloppy and inexact language. Leave as little room for a reader to misinterpret you as possible.
Thank gender-neutral God, then, for the word woke, which can be placed into any context without losing the laser-like focus of its completely comprehensible and enduring meaning.
For any readers who are mercifully unfamiliar with the evolution of the word, a quick primer: prior to the Trump era, the word’s use expanded from Black American activists to a wider use among progressives, broadly coming to mean alertness to structural oppression and social inequities. Now it means… whatever the hell you want it to, we guess.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of subjects that have been described as at risk of being destroyed by being “woke” in our national broadsheet.
- The Australian Defence Force.
- PwC.
- Capitalism.
- Fried chicken restaurant hiring policies.
- Victorian Labor.
- US corporate boardrooms.
- US military recruitment.
- That new Grease show.
- Hollywood writers.
- Re-writing old operas.
- The European Union.
- New Zealand tertiary institutions.
- Comedy.
- Climate protests.
- Billionaires.
- Corporations.
- An Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
- Corporations again.
- Easter Time buns.
- Stanford University.
- The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.
- The Oscars.
- Optus.
- All media in Australia not owned by News Corp.
- Self-hating Westerners.
- The $3 million cap on concessionally taxed balances.
- Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern.
- Penny Wong.
- The ABC on employees taking money from gambling companies.
- Gender-neutral God.
- The 21st century, and every state and federal government in Australia.
- Every state and federal government in Australia.
- Sydney Theatre Awards.
- M&M’s.
- Scooby-Doo.
- Jacinda Ardern again.
- Californian billionaires.
- New South Wales Labor.
- Millennials.
- The United Cup tennis tournament.
- US military training.
- Social media, corporate environmental, social and governance activists.
- The Wiggles.
- Blackrock CEO Larry Fink.
- ABC hiring practices.
- The US military again.
- Jamie Oliver.
- Truth-telling.
- Ambulance Victoria.
- UK culture, art and science.
- The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilisation.
- A direct attack on what [Winston] Churchill called “variety”.
- All this climate and identity madness.
- Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party.
This list takes us all the way back to August last year.
That month, the paper published the results of an Australian Institute study that concluded “half of us don’t know what ‘woke’ means” adding “only 12% of Australians knew what woke meant, wouldn’t describe themselves as woke and defined the term as ‘punishing people who don’t think the “right” things on social justice issues’”.
This did not stop the paper from putting out a piece headed “Why we must fight back against the forces of woke” a mere four days later.
Indeed, we can only admire the national broadsheet’s commitment to clarifying the subject for a confused public by giving them so many different uses for the word.
