By far the most mind-numbing and predictable cycle of public debates is the intense focus on terminology. One side uses some term in a sweeping manner, preferably sweeping in all sorts of undesirable connotations in so doing, and the other side denies the term has any meaning whatsoever. Then it becomes a game of definitions, as if anything of significance could be solved by getting out one’s dictionary or adding to it. This past week many were excited to try their hand at defining “woke” and the most publicized results were laughably generic, potentially applying to any number of contradictory political communities and tendencies.
Social phenomena requires a social phenomenology, or a sociology, to understand, not dictionaries or linguistics. I can’t agree with my fellow liberals and my friends on the left who want to say that there isn’t any there there; there’s been a pronounced shift in just the last ten years. It’s of special interest to me because it began entirely with my generation, yet I have almost never personally experienced it in my places of work or in my social life. This has made it rather hard for me to take it very seriously one way or the other. Of course, as a millennial, I am a bit on the “geriatric” side. I also went to a third-string state school for college, and I have always suspected that the student side of this shift was concentrated in more prestigious institutions.
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