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Every word in the woke lexicon conceals activism
Hungarian is genderless. This means there is only one pronoun, ő, meaning both he and she. The possessive is övé, meaning both his and her, but possessive pronouns are in most cases substituted by suffixes, and there is only one for both genders: kutyája means both his dog and her dog.
Every word in the woke lexicon conceals activism. Every single one. To achieve activists’ ambitions of deconstructing systems, terms must have dual meanings – a common, ordinary and reasonable meaning, and a specific, activist meaning. In a policy proposal, for example, the wokerati first make people believe they are using the term in a standard way. And then, once the proposed policy becomes adopted, the meaning of the term is turned into Wokeish.
‘Inclusion’, for instance, has the common meaning of ‘all people are welcome’. But it also has the woke meaning of ‘a space that restricts speech’. How can everyone feel included if speech is allowed that causes members to feel offended, and therefore excluded? Not everyone can, or so runs the woke logic. Therefore, to be truly inclusive, speech needs to be restricted. That would be crazy.
‘Complicity’ is another favourite of the wokerati. In common parlance it means active involvement in something, but in Wokeish it means benefitting from systems that oppress. American academic Barbara Applebaum provides a good example of this in Being White, Being Good: ‘All white (and white-adjacent) people are complicit in the maintenance and harms of systemic racism and white supremacy.’
But the woke agenda runs into trouble as soon as a term is translated out of English, the mother tongue of the leading wokerati. When a woke term is translated from English, only one of its meanings is carried over. The activist agenda, which is fundamentally based on equivocating between the ordinary and the woke meaning of a term, is not imported with the translation. To try to do so, by providing the secondary woke meaning of the word, would expose the linguistic sleight of hand. And if there is no way to conceal this secondary meaning, activists cannot readily achieve their agenda of deconstruction.
For example, there is no specific word in Hungarian for ‘gender’. Consequently, Hungarians import and use the English word ‘gender’, and with it the woke discourse that accompanies the term. (When author and cultural critic Andrew Doyle’s fantastic book, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, was translated into Hungarian, the publisher retained the English title.) The same thing has happened with other languages like Mandarin, where there is also no word for ‘gender’. Indeed, woke English terms have made their way across the globe, from the present sitting judge of the Supreme Court of India, who peppers his lectures with woke Anglicisms, to the ‘inclusion’-packed new Synod document, released by the Vatican last month.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/08/how-woke-language-distorts-the-world/