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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17041 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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You are just continuing to privilege your own perspective on any given term, above the term's actual history and usage.

The same can be said for you and your argument.

Proponents of "woke" actively adopted it and wore it proudly for decades (though it did not "go viral" until more recently); many still wear it proudly today.

And in my experience, a plurality of people feel that the word "woke" does not describe them accurately. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any polling on this at this time.

If a particular word is getting in the way of you making a substantive point clear, then by all means, taboo it. But very close to nobody is confused by the use of words like woke, fascist, or neoliberal. If those words are being used in a merely pejorative way, the audience generally understands this, whether or not they can articulate it. If I say "Hitler was a Nazi," essentially no one outside of small children and the mentally infirm is seriously confused if I later say "Obama is a Nazi." People will in general understand that the first claim is historical, and the second, rhetorical.

In example above, there have been instances of people calling both Bush and other republicans a nazi in an unironic way. Are you just going to ignore those instances because it does not jive with your argument? What would you call its use in those examples?

But deciding to taboo words should be something you do in the process of clarifying discourse on a particular point of substance. Sweeping declarations distinguishing "woke" and "fascist" from "neoliberal" would be inadvisable linguistic prescriptivism even if you had the facts and history right--and you don't even seem to have that going for you.

I don't think you have established with evidence, that the history of the terms differs from what I proposed. And the fact of the matter is that if you hear a hypothetical person described as "woke", "fascist" or "neoliberal", which is more likely to be an accurate description of the person when one knows little to no information about this hypothetical person? The term with the least amount of baggage. If someone is called a "neoliberal" the shoe probably fits at least to some extent. The same cannot be said for "woke" these days, nor fascist, which almost certainly is not accurate.

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