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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> What’s wrong with woke? The word has been around a lot longer than you might think. An event in Harlem in the 1920’s, which ran from 5.00pm to 5.00am was called The Stay Woke Ball, the meaning simply to stay awake.

Indeed, I woke up this morning...

That usage is surely far older than the '20s and I doubt that would surprise anyone.

But I don't think that is the usage in 'Stay Woke Ball': Wiktionary lists obsolete usage of 'wake' as 'To sit up late for festive purposes; to hold a night revel'; to me 'stay woke' there sounds like 'stay sat down' and similar, which is dialectal (British, at least) English for essentially the same as 'stay sitting down'.

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I think you are misunderstanding 'To sit up late...'. This doesn't mean literally to sit, it means to stay up late, regardless of the position in which you do this. Very few revels(parties) would include sitting as the main attraction. So in this case the stay woke ball, being held overnight would indeed mean stay awake for the night, when you would otherwise be sleeping.

No, actually I completely glossed over the 'sit up' part of that definition. My choice of 'stay sat down' as an example was a complete coincidence.

What I meant was just that it's another example of seemingly ungrammatical 'stay <verb in simple past>', but one that's in reasonably common modern usage, and thus that the meaning of 'woke' in 'the stay woke ball' is in the 'to stay up revelling' usage, not (merely, obviously it's necessary) 'wake up and stay in that state' usage.

I think that you've misunderstood the comparison the previous commenter was drawing.

this is entirely possible

You're talking about the word's usage as a verb (the past tense of "wake", ie "I woke this morning"), the article mentions its usage as an adjective ("to be woke").

The quoted example is from the article, and it gives the meaning as 'to stay awake', i.e. verb.

I realise the section heading is talking about the very modern adjectival slang usage - I just disagree that the 'older than you might think' argument that follows is correct, or that if so it has any value (since even the article seems to acknowledge its a different usage to the modern slang).

> The quoted example is from the article, and it gives the meaning as 'to stay awake', i.e. verb.

Yes, but it uses it in "stay woke" not "I woke this morning".

> I just disagree that the 'older than you might think' argument that follows is correct, or that if so it has any value (since even the article seems to acknowledge its a different usage to the modern slang).

I agree, it's not the modern usage as it doesn't have the same meaning, but I think the article means that its usage as an adjective is old, not that the usage with its current meaning is old. Which I guess makes it very debatable if "the word" has been around for that long.

Well, my argument was that it wasn't an adjective, but the same dialectal form as 'stay sat', which I hadn't thought of as being an adjectival usage of 'sat'.

It seems you're right though, it's a 'predicative' adjective, as in 'he is sat over there' or 'he is awake'.

Anyway, Wiktionary's first entry for it is literal adjectival usage, in the 'African-American vernacular, or slang', which assuming correct would make for a more compelling (to me anyway) 'older than you might think' argument, if it presumably just crossed over from that into the figurative usage, and only that took off more broadly.

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