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Comment by tauntz | Hacker News Reader

As a non-native English speaker not living in the US, I've heard the word (or rather, read) multiple times but I honestly have never bothered to research what it actually means but I think I've kinda gotten the context around it(?)

I've seen it being tossed around on Reddit when there's post about US politics/US social issues and it always looked to me like a generic insult thrown at somebody who doesn't like the more conservative "side" of the US political spectrum. I basically got the impression that it's a shorthand for "You think your opinion and views are modern and hip but I don't share the same view on the world and you are stupid due to that". Reading now Urban dictionary, I see that I was.. kinda on the right track?

US is really weird :)

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"Woke" as a political term was originally used to describe someone with political views focused on what they saw as the historical and modern forms of societal oppression: subjugation of women and sexism, racism and forms of societal bias against minorities, homophobia and anti-LGBT views found in mainstream society. To be "woke" was to be someone who was aware of the ways in which American society was and still is unjust to these various minority groups.

Over time, as some of this progressive-minded population became more extreme/absurd, the term came to represent that absurdity and became more of an epithet. Students protesting because they believed the proprietor of a shop on campus was racist when he physically stopped some students attempting to shoplift, because they were black. A rich black female college student who entered a cafeteria was asked to leave, and became the center of a large movement (with ACLU support) outraged at being targeted for eating while black, resulting in the staff members being fired. Members of the ACLU supporting a campaign to censor a book for trans-related wrongthink. These sorts of excesses began to be associated with the term, so now, while it can be used both ways, is more commonly associated with the loud, militant, and extremist portions of the progressive movement, and is generally used as a derogatory term.

I don't see what urban dictionary entries lead you to believe you are on the right track, but the top voted 2-3 do not. Those are what it means: hypocrisy and insincerity about progressive causes.

Might be a language thing then. I'm reading through Urban Dictionary and most of them read to me like "I think I know the other person is dishonest or stupid".

Let's take the most popular definition there:

  Woke - The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue

Again, as a non-native English speaker I have to click through "pretentious". The most popular definition:

  Behaving in an attention-seeking manner via presenting oneself on the surface as being intelligent, provocative, important, avant-garde, humorous or significant, yet harboring ulterior motives, typically involving some form of personal gratification or material gain (e.g. advancement in social status, career, wealth, etc.).
  Note that using this word is often conflated to be a pretentious act in and of itself, as this word is frequently used as a way to easily discredit people, works of art, ideas or statements while simultaneously boosting one's own status.

(btw, as far as I can tell, there's no word or phrase for the same thing in my native language. Which might already start to explain why the whole concept is hard to really understand for me)

So somebody who calls someone else "woke" looks to be, often, trying to discredit the other person, while simultaneously boosting their own status by making the statement that the other person has ulterior motives and does not actually hold the beliefs that they are saying that they hold.

Idk.. it looks like I'm too far from the US culture to really understand this. When somebody says that they think that gay people should not have equal rights to non-gay people, then I see no reason to assume that they don't actually hold that belief and that they would be pretentious. When somebody says the opposite - that gay people should have the same rights than non-gay people then again, I see no reason to assume that they don't actually hold that belief and are pretentious.

Nothing about this looks to have anything to do with progressiveness or hypocrisy or insincerity as far as I can tell but for some reason there's a made-up word to tell the other "side" that "I know you are full of shit and you don't actually believe in what you say".

Be careful about trusting Urban Dictionary too much. It can serve has a useful hint about what some slang means, but is often heavily biased towards the slang used by certain demographics and subcultures (and is vulnerable to brigading). It certainly is not a source of the "one true meaning" of a word.

I am sure your language does have a word that is pretty similar to "pretentious" though it may not have all of the conotations. I recommend a real dictionary that has multiple good definitions or a good cross-language dictionary that can give you several alternate words in your language that map to the various uses of "pretentious".

"Woke" is even more complicated. It is a word that originated over half a century ago in African American culture as part of the civil rights movement. It meant being aware of and working to fight racial injustice. It was then coopted a decade ago by progressive people working on a broader range of social justice issues to describe awareness of those issues. It was then further co-opted by conservative people to mock progressive people as pretentious.

The poster is trying to pretend that only this last meaning is real and valid. They are either ignorant or a racist troll working to further the co-opting of the term.

Thanks for a thorough explanation and background!

I used Urban Dictionary for "pretentious" due to the OP explicitly referring to it to understand the meaning of woke.

But this got me intrigued now :) I still can't think of a phrase or word in Estonian that would convey the same (or even similar) meaning. I searched through a couple of dictionaries now and the translations provided there are really not useful. They mean either "complains a lot" or alternatively "has unreasonably high standards / is high maintenance", "braggy" and "pedantic". And these doesn't sound even remotely close to the English explanation of the word.. at all.

Any fellow Estonians wanna help me out here - is there a phrase or word that would capture the essence of "pretentious" in Estonian? :)

"Braggy" and "pedantic" do share some meaning/conotation overlap with "pretentious" but I don't think "complains a lot" or "has unreasonably high standards" really overlap (though terms for those may in Estonianl.

Another English word that is very similar in meaning is "ostentatious".

If I had to write out my own definition of "pretentious" it would be: Pretending to be higher class, more refined, more educated or more moral than you actually are and implying that makes you superior to other people.

Some further insight if I may. The urban dictionary definitions provide some of the current interpretation. And one interpretation is that the woke movement is pretentious.

You could argue that accusing a target of being pretentious is being pretentious, except that it may be a fact. So we have to keep digging, a quest for the truth rather than just adopting one of the existing interpretations.

Also to note, being pretentious doesn't imply conscious act. Like arrogance, the subject isn't necessarily aware, although it may be.

Are woke supporters pretentious? Either way, let's accept some may well be, and if so, it wouldn't be reasonable to dismiss anyone calling that out as pretentious. Not dismissing the fact some of the wokes opponents may well be the ones being pretentious, or as pretentious as the woke. In any case it has become a sided political clash, we will only settle to a predominant interpretation on this matter once fight is over.

> Also to note, being pretentious doesn't imply conscious act.

It doesn't imply "deliberately trying to appear pretentious", but it does imply "deliberately pretending to be something"

> Idk.. it looks like I'm too far from the US culture to really understand this.

For what it’s worth, I am a native English speaker from the UK and living in Germany, and I kind of agree with you about how the word “woke” appears to get used in practice. I’ve certainly never witnessed a member of a minority saying “your support for people like me is just insincere woke nonsense, stop it”, despite my ex being a stereotype of Champagne socialism and therefore getting the opportunity to see what happens when she did make mistakes while trying to support minority causes.

If this is a US cultural thing, that might also explain it.

Urban Dictionary is a wisdom of the crowd. The most upvoted entry is sometimes a troll or funny (if the latter: let's say we disagree on taste of humor). As another poster said, need to be cautious, and read multiple entries. Or simply don't use it unless you don't have another source (this word is in the dictionary [1]).

Calling someone woke is discrediting the other person. Its like a signal to other people (especially the people who also often use this word), 'this person is politically aligned with X, this person cannot be right'. Its an insult, but so is the term 'wappie' (used in The Netherlands for people 'who don't believe in corona'). Faggot (when not in UK referring to gay person), nazi (when the person clearly isn't). These are all examples of insulting terms. They're polarizing. Even calling someone a communist when they clearly aren't is insulting, because communism is historically related to dictatorial regimes as well as purges (Stalinism comes to mind).

If they call themselves a communist (or a liberal, or a conservative, a nazi, woke, or whatever), fair game. But calling someone else that way when they did not identify with such is uncalled for. Because you put them on a political spectrum, with all kind of strings and assumptions attached to it.

Now, interestingly, calling someone a nazi or a faggot gets you downvoted or banned on most forums, but with a term like woke people still get away with. Not sure why.

According to Google Translate, pretentious translates to pretensioonikas in Estonian as the most popular translation, so it seems like it got borrowed from English (not implying it originates from English, I don't know about the etymology).

[1] $ dict pretentious

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Pretentious \Pre*ten"tious\, a. [Cf. F. pr['e]tentieux. See
     {Pretend}.]
     Full of pretension; disposed to lay claim to more than is
     one's; presuming; assuming. -- {Pre*ten"tious*ly}, adv. --
     {Pre*ten"tious*ness}, n.
     [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:

  pretentious
      adj 1: making claim to or creating an appearance of (often
             undeserved) importance or distinction; "a pretentious
             country house"; "a pretentious fraud"; "a pretentious
             scholarly edition" [ant: {unpretentious}]
      2: intended to attract notice and impress others; "an
         ostentatious sable coat" [syn: {ostentatious}, {pretentious}]
         [ant: {unostentatious}, {unpretending}, {unpretentious}]
      3: (of a display) tawdry or vulgar [syn: {ostentatious},
         {pretentious}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thesaurus]:

[...]

  pretentious translates to pretensioonikas in Estonian as the most popular translation

That's also true in other dictionaries but the definitions of these words are not similar at all.

"pretensioonikas" means basically "one who has high demands / expectations" in Estonian :(

It mentioned a couple of alternatives in Estonian but my Estonian is worse than your Dutch so I can't cook spaghetti from it myself.

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