"Woke", and Other Words without Referents

There's a misconception about language which I see sometimes among linguistics enthusiasts, and which I myself once believed: that language is fundamentally a tool to describe the world. This view treats language as referrential, i.e. it sees words and sentences as first and foremost referring to things and events, much like a pointer in C references a piece of data. In reality, words and sentences carry much more than just referrential meaning. Take the sentence "my soup is cold". It refers to a state of affairs, yes, but in the right context it could be a complaint (intended to voice displeasure) and/or a request (intended to get someone else to bring the speaker a fresh bowl).

"Woke"

I first encountered the adjective "woke" as a word used by African-Americans online to describe a person as being knowledgeable and observant, especially about social and economic injustice. It then acquired a sarcastic usage among black and queer people to criticize the growing trend of brands and corporations using superficial displays of support for progressive causes as advertising. And finally it was appropriated by conservatives, who either didn't know or didn't care about the sarcasm and used it as a pejorative for anyone to their left.

This most recent usage of the word "woke" is significantly less specific than the previous two usages, but conservatives don't seem to realize this. The people who decry "wokeness" seem to think that that word refers to some particular political ideology, as evidenced by their attempts to define it, but these definitions always fall short of the way it's actually used. This is because the kind of meaning that a definition tries to capture, the referrential meaning of a word, is not the point in this case. The primary function of calling something woke is not to state anything about that thing's properties; it's to establish oneself as a member of an in-group by asserting that another is not.

"Enshittification"

I see the word "enshittification" starting down a similar road in the way it's used on the fediverse. Cory Doctorow originally coined it to refer to the specific phenomenon of online platforms shifting from allocating their surplus to their users to allocating it to their shareholders and executives, but I now see it increasingly being used to refer to any instance of a thing getting worse over time, with the vague suggestion that this is because of capitalism. And as "enshittification" becomes bleached of referrential meaning, it becomes a way to identify oneself as part of the in-group of tech-literate critics of corporate capitalism.

In some ways this is a shame. "Enshittification" and "woke" were both originally useful for referring to specific phenomena, and I hope that we can keep "enshittification" that way. In other ways this is just how language works. Words evolve over time, and in-groups are constantly forming and looking for identifying signifiers.

But it seems to me that this particular form of linguistic evolution is part of the larger trend of assimilating and de-fanging revolutionary politics by reducing them to merely signifiers of group association. "Woke" is the linguistic version of the Che Guevara shirt: a signifier that once stood for an inherently countercultural idea, now warped into a shape that serves the dominant culture.