Let me start by admitting I had tried to use the word “woke” in a meaningful way. To me it meant the bullying aspect of the left: shouting down speakers, kicking people out of conventions for expressing unpopular views, calling people who disagree “fascists” or “racists,” mobbing people on Twitter (sorry, “X”) for writing on topics not permitted to their skin color, calling for the firing of lawyers who take on disliked defendants, etc. The ones who declare “silence is violence” or “saying all lives matter makes you a Nazi.” In retrospect, I’m not so sure that was ever the predominant meaning of the term. Since authoritarian Republicans have started using the term, it’s become useless even if it had any value before.

This puts me in the weird position of agreeing with Donald Trump: “And I don’t like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it’s like just a term they use. Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.” He’s used the term a great deal himself, but for a passing moment he was right.

Michael Ruiz writing for Fox News said, “Aside from being the past participle of wake, for decades, it meant conscious and aware – but the slang word has come to represent an embrace of progressive activism, as well.” Actually, in standard English it’s the past tense; the past participle is “awoken.” But the term comes from a dialect in which “woke” is a past participle, so I’ll let that go. The key point is that, according to Ruiz, it means “embracing progressive activism.” That’s too broad to be useful. It’s more precise and promotes better discussion to address specific principles and policies.

A U.S. Sun article gives a different explanation: “Woke has more recently been used as a term to criticize identity politics or to reference millennial ‘snowflake’ attitudes.” That’s close to the way I used the term. It gives examples including an attempt to ban the movie Grease and the mass denunciation of a football player for not getting vaccinated against COVID more quickly.

Writing for National Review, Richard Lowry says: “‘Woke’ has replaced ‘political correctness’ as a term, but the concepts aren’t the same. ‘P.C.’ tended to denote a hypersensitivity to alleged offensiveness, whereas ‘woke’ gets to something that goes much deeper — a critique of American life as fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.” That points in the same direction.

But there are too many variations in usage, and the term has been overused to the point that it’s of little value. Words should be precise, and “woke” isn’t. Writing for Mother Jones, Abigail Weinberg observes, “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, chief warrior in the crusade against ‘wokeness,’ has hurled the word at so many targets as to render it meaningless.”

The article quotes Florida Politics: “Asked what ‘woke’ means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said ‘it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.’” That’s a very different definition. You don’t have to be a Democrat or Green or support identity politics to be “woke” in that sense. In fact — gulp — by that definition, I’m woke.

Let’s wake up from the use of that word. More precise terms are available to criticize mob action, accusations of racial guilt, and intolerance.