Quiz: How many times did Republicans say ‘woke’ at their last debate?
The life and death of (another) bogus political narrative, as traced through one word.
If you watched last week’s Republican presidential debate, you heard a lot of nonsense.
But shockingly, there’s one word you didn’t hear: woke.
Woke had a precipitous decline in usage over the summer. Google searches for the word have tanked. For years, woke was firmly lodged among Merriam-Webster’s most-searched terms, and yet in the last few months, the word has frequently not appeared on that list at all. In August’s first Republican debate, the word came up only once, from Nikki Haley. In the second debate a month later, zero times.
After spending the last few years coopting, redefining, and villainizing all things woke, Republicans have … given up on it?
But I thought it was ever so important.
Dictionary and Google lookups are one thing, but an analysis of news websites surfaces similar results. The NOW Corpus tracks 18 billion words that have appeared in web-based newspapers and magazines since 2010. It shows the usage of woke fell off a cliff this summer. The word came up less than half as often in September as it did in March of this year.
Read the full column at Inquirer.com.