WTF is ‘woke’ Anyway?

And other Nonsense words of the ‘Modern’ Lexicon

Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash

I grabbed my morning coffee and started flipping through my Ground News App. “I don’t need to read this to know exactly where it’s going,” I said, huffing out loud. I was doing my usual doomscrolling and realized that the titles alone were a dead giveaway. “Woke,” “patriot,” and “cancel culture,” the buzzwords blared like Taylor Swift announcing a new album drop impossible to ignore, immediately polarizing, and guaranteed to spark endless debates. It was political Mad Libs, and honestly? I rolled my eyeballs and sighed heavily as I scrolled to the next set of titles.

Here’s the thing: it didn’t matter if the article was from MeidasTouchMedia or The Daily Wire. These are not hypothetical names; they reflect the reality of a media landscape where every headline feels designed to provoke. A quick glance tells you the angle, tone, and likely top three comments. It’s all so predictable. We’re reading from a script without room for nuance or shared understanding. The second I saw one of these words, my brain shut down. Why? Because they’re no longer words, they’re hollow, overused code. Once, they may have carried weight. Now? They’re verbal Rorschach tests where everyone sees what they want. Worse, we’ve all assigned them wildly different definitions based on our echo chambers. For example, to some…