It's really kind of pathetic that people who aren't even operating in good faith are so damn good at completely capturing and re-defining words/phrases that originated on the left.

It speaks to the impotence of the left to be unable to control their own fucking narratives while the right-wing jack booted thugs are able to twist the narrative with seemingly no effort at all or attempt to even make their false narrative make sense.

See: COVID and "My Body, My Choice."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.

The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in recordings from the mid-20th century by Lead Belly and, post-millennium, by Erykah Badu.

I guess the history of the word in the black community doesn't matter? Because racists co-opted it, we have to wipe away the black history of this phrase? Because @Custoslibera@lemmy.world seems to be implying the history of the phrase does not matter, because of how it is used now by fascists operating in bad faith.

[–] skydivekingair@lemmy.world 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I hear what you’re saying, but if I may provide an extreme example… Try wearing a sauvastika in the western world these days and what do you think the response will be? Once a symbol of abundance and prosperity became the most prominent hateful symbol for generations. Decades after the annihilation of Nazi Germany and the swastika is still given their interpretation. I don’t have an answer as to how to prevent this from happening all over again like it is to a lesser degree with vocabulary such as this is describing.

[–] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 18 points 7 months ago

No, that’s not a good example at all. This is closer to Orwell’s Newspeak, in which the government makes a word mean its opposite in order to force a change to the way people think.

A more relevant example is the use of the term “fake news.” The term was originally coined to talk about Trump making up “facts” on the fly that were completely disconnected from reality. Then Trump started using the term to refer to news articles he didn’t like.

He was even asked at one point if by “fake news” he meant the story wasn’t true. He said no - he meant he thinks it’s not something the media should be talking about, true or not.

For his fans and for the media in general, it’s come to mean “false,” but that’s an inversion of the original meaning, which is that Trump was inventing “facts,” mutated to Trump thinking the media shouldn’t be reporting on his extensive dealings with Russians, and finally being interpreted as challenging whether those fully documented and verified meetings even really happened.

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