(Image: Private Media/Mitchell Squire)

Looks like Australian and American political elites have made a one-for-one swap on slangy hot takes: they’ve given us “woke”, and just this past week political analysts in the United States ransacked The Castle for “It’s the vibe”, now popping up on American wonk Twitter.

It follows on from the turn-of-the-century political linguistic exchange when Americans gave the world’s culture warriors “politically correct” and Australia offered “the dog whistle” in exchange.

All four have one thing in common: show me you’re talking about racism (or some other discriminatory -ism) without saying that’s what you’re talking about.

“Woke” is a coward’s word — a sneaky shiv of abuse from the right or, rendered cautiously down to “not woke”, a shield of defence for the centre-left. It’s a punch pulled. A blow ducked. A hard truth evaded. A claim of defamation avoided.

Once Black American shorthand, its first defined use as “well-informed, up-to-date” appears in a glossary of “phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem” in The New York Times in 1962. Seems safe, although the heading gives its political context away: “If you’re woke, you dig it”.

It reappeared in popular culture as a recurring refrain (“I stay woke”) in Erykah Badu’s 2008 release Master Teacher. In Badu’s voice, it’s a declaration of pride in culture and learning.

It broke into widespread public consciousness through that most culturally influential use of social media, Black Twitter. (“Can you imagine the last 10 years of American pop culture without Black Twitter?” asked author Sarah Jackson in a July Wired magazine cover story, “A People’s History of Black Twitter”. Australia? Same. Take @Indigenousx.)

It became institutionally embedded in the way new words are in the English language — by inclusion in the Oxbridge university dictionaries. In 2017, the Oxford Dictionary defined it as “alert to injustice in society, especially racism”. Cambridge, more cautious, qualified further: “aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality”.

Too late. Too polite. By then “woke” was on the fast-track to a term of abuse — suggesting (as per the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary) fakery and pretension. It absorbed its own superlative form: “woke” became definitionally “too woke”.

Track this devolution in the blog of Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary. Last year it offered wokefishing: “pretending to have progressive views on dating apps but not having them in real life”. This year came wokescold: “to criticise someone for not having views that are left-leaning or ‘woke’ enough”.

(“Scold” has travelled its own gendered shift from the old Norse skald — a Viking poet — through Middle English as “a person of ribald speech” to settle in misogyny as a “clamorous, rude, mean, low, foul-mouthed woman” in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary.)

It’s hard to read the Oxbridge definitions into “woke” usage on, say, Sky after dark. When Andrew Bolt dismissed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “woke politics” last month, did he mean to criticise politicians for being “alert to injustice”? Or when doggerel laureate Senator Matt Canavan warned the Wiggles “you go woke, you go broke”, did he mean to challenge 60 years of marketing and entertainment strategy which sees the value of being “alert to injustice” in product design?

The right’s weaponisation has brought pushback. In 2019, US journalist Joel Anderson (creator of the latest must-listen series of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast on the 1992 LA riots) tweeted: “One word that I really wish black people had never used in public was ‘woke’. But we lost it and it’s gone now … when I see ‘woke’ now I immediately suspect it’s being invoked in service of racism.”

With one question this month — “Are Democrats too woke?” — CNN’s Dana Bash brought the debate roaring back. Serious political writers such as The Washington Post’s national correspondent Philip Bump tried to damp it down as “an appropriated descriptor that’s used to disparage rhetoric or policy that is seen as overly centered on discussions of race”.

Anderson, at least, wasn’t having it. Last week he tweeted: “If you’re not black and started using ‘woke’ pejoratively sometime post-2018 or so (or worse, don’t know anything about the earlier iteration of the term), I think it’s fair to consider it a racial slur.”