There are a lot of new terms that “Woke” people use, and a lot of words that they use in different ways than many other people do. I think it would be useful to have a maximally objective/apolitical online resource to catalogue these. I think the name is pretty good and it could become pretty popular pretty quickly with good design, branding, and PR.
I think this would be helpful in several ways: - It would help prevent misunderstandings that are really just about the meanings of words. - It could help highlight and make explicit political conflicts over which definitions of words are to be preferred. - It would help people who are not familiar with “wokeness” to get up to speed.
Underlying parts of my model here are: - Wokeness gets some important things right. A lot of people could have a lot to learn from wokeness, but might be turned off by the way woke people use words (e.g. a much broader use of the word “racist”). - Wokeness gets some important things wrong. Broader understanding of wokeness would increase the likelihood of well-informed and well-intentioned critiques impacting woke communities.
I’m using “Woke” to refer to this set of communities/ideologies, even though I don’t think it’s a great term for it, since I find it can have a somewhat negative/mocking connotation. It would be nice to have a more neutral term (suggestions welcome!).
Idea: the “woketionary”
There are a lot of new terms that “Woke” people use, and a lot of words that they use in different ways than many other people do. I think it would be useful to have a maximally objective/apolitical online resource to catalogue these. I think the name is pretty good and it could become pretty popular pretty quickly with good design, branding, and PR.
I think this would be helpful in several ways:
- It would help prevent misunderstandings that are really just about the meanings of words.
- It could help highlight and make explicit political conflicts over which definitions of words are to be preferred.
- It would help people who are not familiar with “wokeness” to get up to speed.
Underlying parts of my model here are:
- Wokeness gets some important things right. A lot of people could have a lot to learn from wokeness, but might be turned off by the way woke people use words (e.g. a much broader use of the word “racist”).
- Wokeness gets some important things wrong. Broader understanding of wokeness would increase the likelihood of well-informed and well-intentioned critiques impacting woke communities.
I’m using “Woke” to refer to this set of communities/ideologies, even though I don’t think it’s a great term for it, since I find it can have a somewhat negative/mocking connotation. It would be nice to have a more neutral term (suggestions welcome!).