Hacker News Reader

Comment by f-securus | Hacker News Reader

Care to elaborate? I’ve read about 5 different explanations for ‘woke’ the last couple of months.

You can derail any discussion by asking for definitions. Human languages is magical in the sense that we can't rigorously define anything (try "Love", "Excitement", "Emancipation" or anything else, really) yet we still seem to be able to have meaningful discussions.

So just because we can't define it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

It's not a derail, it's an attempt to understand the other person. If I say Thing is bad and you say Thing is good but we haven't actually defined Thing, then we could be talking past each other and not actually be in disagreement. Text over the Internet is such a limited medium.

CNN's YT channel has this clip of Bill Maher taking a stab at it:

How Bill Maher defines 'woke' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzwC-10O0cw

Bill has has flaws, but he is right.

Is this a definition that people who identify as "woke" would use?

If not, then it seems like just another straw man and set up for talking past one another.

Yep, here’s a good overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

It’s been around a long time.

There is more than one usage described in that article.

This is the relevant one in this particular thread:

> Among American conservatives, woke has come to be used primarily as an insult.[4][29][42] Members of the Republican Party have been increasingly using the term to criticize members of the Democratic Party,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com