As is usual with the Mail, the headline tells readers what they are expected to think before actually bothering to read the supporting article. “Thought policing couldn’t get more farcical? Now mail officer dons jacket to experience menopause … WOKE STUNT ROW OVER MET TERROR CHIEF’S ‘HOT FLUSH VEST’”. Misuse of WOKE. With another misuse waiting in the wings.
“Britain’s anti-terror chief was accused of going woke last night after wearing a menopause jacket at work … Matt Jukes donned the garment, which has heat pads to simulate hot flushes, in a meeting to mark Menopause Awareness Month”. Misuse of WOKE again. With a retired former senior cop also misusing WOKE, probably because his comment was written for him.
So far, so Daily Mail Slow News Day. And so pretentious, with the article being claimed as an “exclusive”, most likely meaning that no-one else wanted to run it, and there is a strong possibility this means it is merely editorial propagandising. But what it tells us best is that the Mail wants to embed the equivalence of WOKE and SOMETHING BAD in its readers’ consciousness.
That requires language misuse, as WOKE has two definitions, neither of which fits the Mail’s rant. One, the more minor definition, means “well-informed, up to date”, while the other, more major definition, is “alert to injustices in society, especially racism”. What the man from the Met was doing was neither of these things. The Mail meant Political Correctness.
I'm not f***ing racist, I employ blacks and Jews, c***
And Two, by hijacking the term, the real definition of WOKE becomes lost, papered over, hidden from reader view. Worse, correct use of WOKE induces a hate reaction - against those who are concerned about societal injustice and especially racism. It’s a win-win for the Mail titles - they get to demonise whatever they choose, while downplaying injustice and racism.
That is why the Mail, and other right-leaning papers, keep on misusing terms like WOKE. This is not a mistake, not an accident, and most certainly not some kind of blundering and howling at the moon from the Vagina Monologue and his unfortunate underlings. Being able to keep their readers both frightened and ignorant, while demonising awareness of injustice and racism, are the equivalent of a new Holy Grail among the authoritarian right.
All those years ago, even at the Murdoch press, editors like Larry Lamb wanted to use English. Dacre and his wretched editors have dispensed with such minor inconveniences. Other titles are following suit. But they would do well to remember who said “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. That was Humpty Dumpty, in Through The Looking Glass.
He ended up having a Great Fall. The Dacre equivalent will be worth the wait.
https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton
12 comments:
I think your definitions are too prescriptive, Tim. Language evolves in ways that the users find functional. In the way that the Mail and its readers understand it, ‘woke’ means ‘something I don’t like in the area of social attitudes and mores’. It’s a useful term because, the way they see it, it’s a ready-made verbal weapon which they can deploy without having to think. Using it is also an identity signifier and reflected back from an interlocutor it provides a comforting sense of bonding. Like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘patriotism’ it assumes, without requiring any evidence or the need to think, that the other person’s definition of nebulous abstractions coincides with your own.
On closer examination, users of ‘woke’ are not happy with the way the world appears to be going, it’s not the way it was and so they feel uncomfortable with it.They are the slow-learners, the 'left-behind' and the use of 'woke' should arouse pity in the rest of us. In time they will become accustomed to changes in public sensitivities and social awareness and, just as their antecedents got used to doing without attending a public beheading or watching the local witch-burning of a weekend, most of them will grudgingly adjust and ultimately come to be surprised and embarrassed by what they used to believe was normal and ‘just common sense’.
Meanwhile, it’s best just to laugh at them, I think. This mindless term which they seem to believe has great power, is just, to us, a risible, clicheed dud; like any Tory PM at PMQs believing that all they have to say to demolish any Labour argument ever is: ‘Jeremy Corbyn’.
Laugh at the silly buggers
Standard Dog Whistle English for the Rothermere Daily Heil and the Murdoch Scum. There are plenty of other examples on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nothing new about it. Der Stürmer and Volkischer Beobachter used the German equivalent.
Britain and its "democracy" since 1979. Anyone who thinks British corporate media will change for the better has been asleep for the last 43 years.
Back in the day it would have been ‘do-gooder ‘.
The term "Nazi" was introduced by opponents to "just laugh" at them. That didn't turn out too funny either.
So no surprise the Daily Mail then and now allied itself with support of the Nazi mentality.
Yeah, a laugh a minute.
It would be interesting to look further into how the word woke became much more known in the last ten years or so.
I am well aware that the word goes as far back as possibly 1930's America, but was heard very little until recently.
My guess is a newsroom, possibly a Murdoch one, somewhere in America, where some "journalist" discovered!!! the word.
Devastating argument as ever, Anonymous 22.41. I'd never realised that Charlie Chaplin was responsible for the holocaust.
I'd refer you to Jeremy Corbyn's recent comment about 'still living rent-free in Tory MPs' heads'. Get over it, man.
The Daily Heil. The definition of the banality of evil.
12:30.
Nah. The Nazis and their apologists were responsible for the Holocaust.
You know, the mentality you want to "just laugh at" and "get over it". Which marshmallow ignorance is one reason the Nazis rose to power, and why Britain now has become a far right racist one party state with media to match.
Have a "nice" marshmallow day.
Burlington Bertie.
Certainly words change their meanings, but this is no more evolution than genetic engineering is.
The Tabloids are deliberately trying to redefine "Woke" rather than use "Politically Correct".
From idiot Daily Mail 'Woke' menopause-simulating copper stories to, er, 6 million Jewish (and other ) deaths.
Sense of proportion always one of your strong points, eh, Anon?
Still, I'm sure that if we let our guard down for one second and just take the time to take the piss out of the rabid and ignorant old time-servers on the Mail, we can all expect to be rounded up and 'sent to the East' by Christmas.
And you know what? It'll all be our own fault.
Have a grim evening.
Btw C Chaplin was a comic actor (cockney, I'm afraid). Google him.
16:34.
Coherence not your strong point, especially when marshmallow pleading for "a sense of proportion" for a Nazi mentality. Check out the Daily Mail record and its "sense of proportion" for Nazism and fascism - not difficult, since it hardly varied over almost nine decades.
Check out Chamberlain's "sense of proportion" with the Nazis and where that got the world, then and now. It's in all of the history books.
But I don't expect you to understand that. Not with your "sense of proportion".
Don't displace your own obtuseness, Anonymous, as being the result of my imagined incoherence.
And where on earth did you get 'get over it' from? You arguing with your own imaginings there, eh? Makes for an easier contest I suppose.
Also, 'sense of proportion' referred to your laughably (il)logical leaps from silly stories about a well-intentioned (?) copper's attempt at menstrual empathy, to Nazis, Auschwitz and the holocaust. Still don't get it? Ah, well.......
As your self-parodying apocalyptic bleats daily demonstrate, me old mate, you really wouldn't recognise a sense of proportion (or, for that matter, a sense of humour) if it jumped up off your packet of Werthers and bit you in the haehmorrhoids.
Fraternally
B.Bertie
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