[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer at WNYC, and with us now is Columbia University Linguist, host of the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley and New York Times opinion writer, John McWhorter. He's got a virtual New York Times event coming up Thursday night called Woke Words, it's somewhat related to a Times newsletter column called, How Woke Became an Insult that John wrote. Let's start there and we'll get to other words and phrases whose meanings or implications have changed. Hi John, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

John McWhorter: Hi Brian, always happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to other words too but to start with woke, you wrote that it seems like it was 10 minutes ago that it was the hot new brand of enlightenment. You cited being used commonly on Twitter as far back as 2012, being used as far back in a very different way by the blues singer, Lead Belly in 1938. Can you start there and take us through some of the origin story of the word, woke?

John McWhorter: Yes, woke was supposed to mean awakened. It was Black English slang for awakened and it meant awakened to certain political realities that especially people left of center, are aware of. That's what it continued to mean in the Black community kind of under the radar, not used in writing very much until our modern times, when it happened to jump the rails after about 2010. After about 2010, it started being used by non-Black people to mean awakened to, especially what we're now talking about so much as systemic racism, institutional racism and the general operations by what we might all call the Man with a capital M.

That was woke, and it was positive what it did, it's a very neatly replaced PC, which had come to be used more as a slur than as a compliment. If you're a certain age, you remember and I hate to admit that I'm now a certain age, in the '80s, you could say PC and not mean it as a joke. A person would say, "I'm politically correct," and it was meant as straight as saying, "I'm using a fork and a knife." Then that settled upon it and people who didn't agree with that political viewpoint, started to feel abused and PC became something that people started trying to slip away from being described as, woke, very neatly replaced it. Then woke got broken too.

Brian Lehrer: Just musically speaking for a second, there's a line from Lead Belly to Erykah Badu.

John McWhorter: [chuckles] It really is. The idea was that to be somebody who has a certain awareness, to be somebody who has a certain legitimacy to speak, to be ready, to go out into the world and try to change it, you need to be awakened to certain things that it might be easy to miss. If you are not awake and we can assume that with Lead Belly, it's not that he made it up, he would've picked it up in his community. People could have been saying, "Woke," decades before that, but that's just the first time that we can see it used in a way that's recorded. We tend to forget how much speech went on and was never either recorded or written down before about 10 minutes ago.

Then it happened really, right under our feet. I remember, I was on a TV show talking about how woke was a relatively new word to me back in 2018. Even since then, it really has tipped into being used more as a word of dismissal and abuse than as a neutral word. I'm at the point where when I write woke, I realized only about two months ago, when I write woke, I now have to understand that it doesn't mean what it meant in 2017. It's harder to write it neutrally. Now you have to think about what other people are thinking, that's how words change.

Brian Lehrer: Would it be accurate to say, the mainstream usage has changed from a compliment to an insult, in certain circles? I'm thinking, for example, of the Right wing talk show host, Glenn Beck who for years used the term, social justice, ironically and demeaningly, but advocates of social justice still use that earnestly today. Maybe that's the same with woke, that you can still write woke if you mean it in an earnest respect, just you know that somebody on Fox or whatever is going to shoot arrows at it.

John McWhorter: I think if you use woke in that neutral way now, you are asserting that you're going to do it in the face of something that's become so common, that you think of yourself as tilting at the windmills or standing up straight. It reminds me of the way some people were reclaiming liberal back in the arts, when you had people like Ann Coulter using it with that kind of snarl, that she used. That was part of a whole fashion from the right at the time, try not to talk to a liberal.

Then there were people who were saying, "No, god damn it, I am a liberal." Now, you would have to use woke in that way and say, "Yes, I'm sure as hell woke and I don't care what these other people are saying about it." I think it would be very much on the defensive.

Brian, here's a guess. These guesses are so often wrong but that doesn't mean that people like me won't make them. Social justice, I sense that the knives are sharpening against the use of that term because there are people who disagree with what the current conceptions of it are. For people who are listening and thinking, "Like him?" Yes, I do have certain disagreements with a lot of what is being called, Social Justice these days. I'm not saying that I'm going to try to tackle the term.

I think that social justice is going to be a term that is used with irony by people like Glenn Beck and as such people who use it in a more neutral way, are going to start being more on the defensive. Mark my words, let's go back to this in 20 years. In 20 years, what's now meant as social justice by "The Woke," there'll be some other term, because social justice will have become too loaded within our current context.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I think we didn't close the loop on Erykah Badu by the way, there's a particular song, right? I think it's Master Teacher.

John McWhorter: Yes, that's the one that seems to have really tipped it because of her prominence.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, ask John McWhorter about the word, Woke. [chuckles] Or talk about how you have used it or stopped using it or changed how you use it, 646-435-7280. Or we can broaden this and we will broaden this to other words or phrases for which you think the meaning has changed over time or that people have stopped using. John writes about the new attempt to not use the term, You Guys. We'll get to that, you guys.

Any other ones from you, listeners, or how you use woke, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Before we get to, You Guys, I want to make sure we put woke and the conversation around it in the historical context that you put it in. Your article mentioned that, since it originated in its political meaning from Black Vernacular English that might have affected it's trajectory in white America. Seeing the phrase, Stay Woke, on white people's T-shirts, that's a phenomenon that's happened with a number of words, right?

John McWhorter: Definitely. It's part of the browning of America, that it's easy to miss, especially if you are not a certain age these days, but something really started happening in the late '80s and crested in the mid '90s. Such that it's now ordinary for mainstream culture to borrow Black slang and things that are definitely known prominently as Black slang. There's this love-hate relationship with Black English. The whole discussion that we used to have in the '70s and '80s where Black English is discussed as this despised dialect. All of that was very much true then, and there's some of it now.

It's also true that, because of all of the contact that the races have, because of the nature of Pop culture and because of the nature of social media, there is also a great affection for Black English. Black English is read as trustworthy to the extent, that for example, you can see that Black voices. We all know what I mean by that, that you can identify most Black people by their vowels, for example.

Black voices are all over Madison Avenue at this point. It's clearly considered a plus for the person who's doing the advertising to have that particular vocal quality. I would say they're also on NPR, I'm noticing. I don't know if it's a conscious decision, but I get the feeling somebody up there has decided that especially having a Black male voice for the announcements in the bumpers is a good thing. That is something that would've been unheard of in, say 1995 or even in 2000. There's a real change coming.

Brian Lehrer: You were quoted in the Atlantic recently about the term, You Guys. The problem with that is obvious, it's gender specific and it's used to refer to people who aren't just male. You rift on the word, Y'all, as a replacement gender-neutral term that some people are using. You predicted, Y'all would not catch on beyond a certain point. Can you talk about You Guys versus Y'all?

John McWhorter: Well, Y'all, it seems to me has such a stigma attached to it, in many quarters that it'll keep it from really catching on. Just a little stigma doesn't really have much effect on whether something gets around but when something is really singled out, it's like in Black English acts, instead of ask. Then it has a way of keeping it from settling in beyond a certain point. Y'all is also associated not only with Black people but with the South, so it's seen as a regionalism and they're always those tensions and those interpretations.

As far as You Guys, it's a weird thing because you think you're talking about guys and the guys are male, but it's beginning to be processed by many people as quite gender-neutral in the same way as They has been processed in some contexts as gender-neutral, since medieval times, despite an eternal resistance against it. People hear language differently than a pedant might write it down.

For many women, You Guys is okay. For many women, it's not. I can completely understand it. Language change is trying to make You Guys a way of just saying folks or people with the reference to maleness being something that you only reflect about, something that somebody has to be told about. It's neat to see.

Brian Lehrer: Wilson in Bushwick. You're on WNYC. Hello Wilson.

Wilson: Hi Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I'm an English professor for CUNY, and so this conversation is very interesting to me. You mentioned Master Teacher, which I think is a great song by Erykah Badu, when she talks about being awake, it's very important. You're also talking about, Y'all versus You Guys.

I'm from the south originally. I live in Brooklyn now, but I do prefer the term Y'all to You Guys because it is gender-neutral. I think this idea about being woke is important because it is connected to racialized or I would say anti-racist ideology. When you're talking about being woke, you're talking about not aware of the white supremacy that exists in the country. I guess I would say that, yes.

John McWhorter: I completely agree with that. There's a kind of person. I think of it as defaultly a white person who looks at what's going on in America and says, "What are Black people complaining about? What's the big deal. My grandfather did this, my grandmother did that, what's the issue? What's the tension?" Contrary to what some people might think. I am not one of those people. I just tend to complicate the matter.

There does need to be a term for being aware that there are larger issues than just whether or not somebody uses the N-word and whether or not you can live in a certain neighborhood, that needs to be there. Politically correct, I remember when I first heard it in '84, I thought, "What a useful term." Woke is somewhat more racialized. When I first picked up that, that was now, as we say a thing, I thought, "Yes, there needs to be that." I'm glad that it came from Black English.

I don't think that wokeness [unintelligible 00:12:48] what everybody meant in 2015 is something that is wrong. I don't think wokeness itself is wrong. Now, I think that there are woke people who can be rather sadly abusive towards those who aren't or those who aren't enough. I think that's where the impatience comes in and people start having unpleasant associations with the word, but wokeness in itself. Yes. I call that part of being an educated, enlightened person. It's just what happens when all these things hit the ground.

Brian Lehrer: Wilson. Thanks. Call us again. Nikki in Somerville, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nikki. Do we have Nikki in Somerville? Is it Nikki? Hi there.

Nikki: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Nikki: I was thinking about the advertising and media part of using woke. When I went to college at NYU and when I first learned woke, it was there, but I remember watching an SNL sketch about Levi's jeans that are gender-neutral nonconforming, non-body like they don't fit. Their tagline is, it fits everyone because it doesn't fit anyone. They're called Levi's Wokes, which I thought was interesting because it's like a perversion of the word which I had just been introduced to at that point as being something that meant more like actually aware and eye-opening. [unintelligible 00:14:12]

[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Once you see it being used to sell jeans then it's over.

Nikki: It seems a little gimmicky after that and then anytime I would experience it in a social setting, it was almost like mocking.

Brian Lehrer: Is there another word or phrase that you would use to convey the same thing in a serious way?

Nikki: My friends and I tend to lean social justice, social awareness, socially conscious. We use more academic terms I feel like, that's like our tendency, but in the beginning we did use woke very seriously. I can't even think about how it changed overnight for us.

Brian Lehrer: Nikki, thank you.

John McWhorter: I think that inevitably advertising is going to create those moments for us, where we feel like something is being exploited or distorted or, and the wrong vision of it is going to spread because advertising is so vivid and sticks so much in our minds. Another thing about advertising is that you get into the notion of irony or wit which can be so subtle, especially since different people have different visions of what is witty and to what extent we use irony, and whether or not it's okay. I wish there were more study done of that particular aspect of being a human being.

It makes these things more complicated. We think that a word means something and we think of a dictionary that just isn't the way language works. It's so clear to us in our times because we see these things happening in social media in real-time. Very quickly we can all talk to each other in a way that wasn't possible until roughly 15 years ago. It's a challenge. We have to adapt our sense of what it is for a word to mean something because if it's at all interesting a word, it doesn't mean any one thing, even though we would like it to.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Nancy on the upper west side in defense of You Guys. Hi Nancy, you're on WNYC.

Nancy: Hi, I'd like Mr. McWhorter, his opinion on this, because what I've understood was that guy refers to Guy Fawkes and his Catholic rebellion against parliament and his attempt to blow up parliament. I think it's 1605, but I'm not sure.

It came to mean over the years between now and 1605 or whenever You Guys became a common substitute for Y'all, at least here that it meant a daring person, a person who was willing to take a chance. From there a jovial person, a happy easy-going person. That was a transformation in itself, but it never meant exclusively men. Although probably the people who were planning to blow up parliament were almost all men. If not [unintelligible 00:17:10] What do you think?

Brian Lehrer: Chances are.

John McWhorter: [laughs] I think that I would say that guy, as it evolved from that usage was a male reference rather than one to a generally exuberant or daring person. To reclaim it and to suppose that we need to think of guy as exemplifying the spirit of the conspirators of the Guy Fawkes attempt. I think we can assume that most of them, if not all of them were men, but still, that is healthy because if you ask me, people are not going to stop saying You Guys to rooms full of women, especially since let's face it, many women do it.

We can converse about it, but it's not going to stop. It seems healthier to me to just wrap our heads around a way that we can like it. That is a creative one, but I certainly could not disapprove.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we'll stop in a lot of places because people will decide that it marginalizes women. They won't say it, right?

John McWhorter: Those people will certainly not say it. I completely understand that point of view, especially since there are studies, there are actual cycle linguistics studies that show that for all you might say that using some originally male form as a gender-neutral term means both of the genders and not just the guy. You can show that people are thinking about the male reference more than the female reference. That's been shown in particular for French, where you say ils for they. It means both they men and they women.

Now you're thinking of the they men more than the they women. That is definitely a principle. It's something that we have to think about. Then again, is the solution to that to really prescribe You Guys and make people feel really bad about it. That happens with some words, that's the stigma that I'm talking about that really can help make change, but it tends to only work for a certain few really in-the-shop window items. Maybe You Guys would become one of those things. We'd have to see.

Brian Lehrer: Now I see you're going to have this virtual event, Thursday night for New York Times subscribers specifically. People have to be a Times subscriber to log on to this that will explore the evolving role of language in our lives. I guess you're going to be talking about woke and other words.

John McWhorter: It's called Woke Words. If you miss it then, not everybody can be dealing with something Thursday, when you were supposed to be cooking dinner, you can drop in on it later. It will be recorded for posterity, unlike the true history of the word woke. But yes, that is happening Thursday at 7:00 PM.

Brian Lehrer: It's not just you. You're going to be talking to, I forget the name of the-

[crosstalk]

Go ahead.

John McWhorter: Jane Coaston, who is always great fun to talk to. She and I have done like 400 things together. Yes, I'll be talking with Jane Coaston.

Brian Lehrer: She does The Argument, right?

John McWhorter: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Which brings people with multiple points of view together.

John McWhorter: Exactly and she's very good at it and so she will be my interlocutor.

Brian Lehrer: What's next for you? What can we look for from you on Lexicon Valley, on Slate or in your Time's newsletter, or anywhere else?

John McWhorter: Well, in brief, I have a book coming out called Woke Racism that's going to make a lot of people angry and some people happy. That comes out on October 26th. I want to say my podcast Lexicon Valley is no longer at Slate, but it's the same show still going at booksmart.com. I'm doing the same show, but I'm doing it under a new empire on Substack. Lexicon Valley continues and it is still one of my great loves. Next is Woke Racism in a couple of weeks. Those two things.

Brian Lehrer: Everybody winds up on Substack, eventually.

John McWhorter: It's [unintelligible 00:20:51]

Brian Lehrer: John McWhorter, thanks a lot.

John McWhorter: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna, and Carl Boisrond. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on our daily podcast, Juliana Fonda and Liora Noam-Kravitz at the audio controls. Our interns this fall are James O'Donnell and Prerna Chaudhary I'm Brian Lehrer.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.