WOKE. SLANG. THEY ARE BOTH FOUR LETTER WORDS — a euphemism first recorded in 1923 in a slang dictionary (French author, English lexis), with a reference to the concept of a “four-letter-man,” (a three-letter man, meanwhile, is variously a c-a-d or f-a-g). The one a convenient shorthand for words and deeds deemed racially and socially permissable or, perhaps more important, not; the second a hard-to-define catch-all for what I term the “counter-language”.
Opposite poles, one might think. Yet this isn’t simple either. As a concept, “woke” is slang’s worst enemy. A hard-faced, black-clad puritan determined to eradicate every vestige of joyous, colourful slang’s . Everything in which slang delights — insults both individual and stereotyped, obscenity, double entendres, an irrepressible propensity to call every spade a spade — has woke twitching away its sensible, sexless garments in a frenzy of
