Comment by preciousoo
5 days ago
It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss.
Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type
https://x.com/seunosewa/status/1878835480424513903
"Usage is usage. I don't make the rules."
He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:
> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however. There are a lot of loose ends in it and this is a glaring one.
He also uses “political correctness”, which is a more precise way to describe the phenomenon he talks about. But that buzzword died a long time ago, so “the origins of woke” without actually touching on the origin of “woke” will do.
> He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however
Because he's not talking about the terms original meaning. Plenty of people are reading the title thinking he's digging into the etymological origins of the term. He's talking about the origins of the ideas that contemporary people call "woke".
It's not an omission. Paul explicitly clarifies what he's talking about near the top of the piece. You and other readers simply wanted him to write about a different topic entirely.
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