Mastering Wokese

How do you prefer your word salad? Apparently, it’s a matter of your social class, according Nick Clairmont, who is kind enough to explain “wokese” to those of us who are merely fluent in English.

As a language, wokeness is self-consciously engineered to be easier to exploit and use to bully your way to the top if you are a member of a “marginalized group” (to use woke parlance). That is, in a community where everyone speaks wokese, the intention is that a trans woman of color will have her ideas advanced and her enemies thwarted, and will generally be advantaged by the milieu she finds herself within, because that is how the rules are structured.

But as Nick — who comes from Brooklyn and went to a fancy school, so is naturally fluent in wokese — explains, it’s not enough to be marginalized to sit atop the wokeness pyramid.

Who does the woke playing field, as expressed through wokese, actually advantage? As a barrier to entry that is manufactured in universities, mediated by elite institutions and bureaucracies, and is intentionally complex and constantly changing, wokese is a tool that is most easily wielded by the credentialed elite—which suggests that the allegedly vulnerable cohorts in whose name this language is allegedly spoken are actually being used by others as rhetorical camouflage.

In other words, the reason why Hispanics refuse to call themselves Latinx isn’t that they shouldn’t be called Latinx, but they just aren’t elite enough to realize their oppression and demand it be remediated. Pendejos.

So you weren’t born in Brooklyn and didn’t learn wokese by osmosis as it wasn’t spoken in your home since birth. Does that mean you never get to eat word salad? No, Nick is here for you (and me, too!).

Here’s how you do it: You talk about platforms, and spaces, and bodies with your nouns. With your verbs, well, you just use more nouns, plus suffixes that don’t fit. For some reason, this year, you put “settler” before you write “colonialism.” The letter X is very in, as you may have noticed when Elizabeth Warren’s campaign did an event with a group called Black Womxn For. Or maybe you have by now read about the now-infamous wokese imposition of “Latinx” (pronounced Latin-ex) to name a group of people first designated by a Nixon administration-era census as an ethnicity, and whose members either haven’t heard or don’t want to be termed by that label rather than the supposedly problematic “Latino” or “Hispanic.”

Study this. It will be on the test.

In wokese, if you say some sort of discrimination exists, you have to say it is “systemic.” It’s just a moral demand that if you talk about one thing, you also have to gesture toward another—but it pretends to be grammar. You do not actually have to explain how the system functions as a system in a way that removes the agency of the actors within it, and indeed you would be messing up the syntax if you did. This is sort of like the previously popular wokese term “problematic,” which unlike its English equivalent does not mean that the person using it intends to expound on what the problem is.

For those of us who lack fluency in wokese, we might have been confused by the pervasive use of “systemic racism,” wondering what system are they talking about and why they are contending that it’s racist. Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids.

Like many languages that have irregular verbs, wokese also has special rules that mean, in some specified random cases, you do the opposite of what you normally do. So if a wokese sentence is about the Jews, flip the normal rules around. Where you might normally say, “members of this marginalized group suffer from transgenerational trauma from the worst ever instance of genocidal racist violence in living memory, and allowances must be made for that,” if the subject of the sentence is Jews you reverse all that.

But one of the many mistakes us groundlings make about wokese is to presume it follows from the social justice side of progressives to the Marxist side of progressives. Untrue, as Nick explains.

Of course, actual Marxists seem to think wokeness is something between completely empty nonsense and a cunning usurpation of their political project’s rightful place in the political firmament.

But if Marxists hate wokesters, that doesn’t mean “Marxist” has a negative connotation in wokese. In fact, one of the ways wokese keeps its outsider transgressive language vibe despite being the lingua franca of every international corporation, Hollywood, and monopoly social media platforms—in other words, despite being the language of The Man—is in the nasty inflection it gives to “capitalism,” as though wokeness were a revolutionary threat to the current ruling order rather than the tool of its elites. The fact that Woke Marxism is a cosmetic affectation with zero political content makes for one of the areas in which wokese-to-standard-English translation can be the hardest.

Hopefully, this clears things up for those of us who will struggle to get through an interview for a tenured chaired professorship. But lest you now feel empowered to wear black and protest, be warned that wokese may be on its way out.

Capitalism isn’t the only term in wokese that takes on a radically, sometimes opposite or completely unrelated meaning to its ordinary English public definition—and then fails to stipulate that it’s doing so. In fact, the biggest usage difference between wokese and English is about “woke” itself. Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times writer and committee chair of the wokese equivalent of the Académie Française, recently tweeted that “in short order ‘woke’ went from being a playful piece of black vernacular to a euphemism for ‘n*gger lover.’”

Wait, what?

Of course, Bouie doesn’t mean that anyone literally uses the term “woke” to mean what he says they mean. He would simply like people to stop using the term, and so—according to the rules of the game—he stipulates that it implies a slur, and uses the combination of his race status and his position at The New York Times to try to enforce his will.

This is exhaustingly problematic, so after I finish my word salad (which I prefer with bleu cheese dressing and athwart with bacon), I’m going to take a systemic nap.

12 thoughts on “Mastering Wokese

  1. Dan

    It’s ironic that, given its disdain for (indeed, condemnation of) privilege, the champions of Marxism (whether in its traditional form, or in its modern Critical Theory form) are overwhelmingly privileged. This irony doesn’t seem to be lost on Clairmont.

  2. Kirk A Taylor

    Like all “well intentioned” rules and regulations, it seems even wokeness will tend to be used by the powerful for the benefit of themselves and their cronies.

    I should have already realized this.

    Thanks for pointing it out.

  3. Richard Kopf

    SHG,

    Old men think of old books. In a better world, it would be useful to read or reread Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa’s book entitled “Language in Thought and Action,” last published in the 1991 as the Fifth Edition.

    Sadly, I have no illusion that SIH remains relevant in a world where the English language increasingly means only what propagandists say it means. After all, “sex” no longer means “sex” and castration must therefore become a mere social construct.

    All the best.

    RGK

    1. SHG Post author

      And yet, they still manufacture penile plethysmographs.

      For a while, I kept a list of words that had become untethered from an cognizable definition, but then the list got too long and all the legal academics explained to me that I just wasn’t smart enough to appreciate the ever-flowing depth of meaning conveyed by their lingo.

  4. Anonymous Coward

    Instead of using the word “hispanic”, you should use “hispanxc” , otherwise you are limiting its scope hispanos and hispanas only.

    To comply with Berkeley law, you must use theypanxc.

  5. Pedantic Grammar Police

    Clairemont’s essay was a delight to read. I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair, and learned something too.

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