Why we need the word ‘woke’

Has the word ‘woke’ become a lazy, all-too-common cliché? The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver thinks so. During an appearance at the Hay Festival, she has lamented how the word has become ‘horribly overused’. The author says: ‘I’m as tired of it as you are. There have been other people trying to coin something else, which we’d also get tired of, but they usually have more than one syllable so they don’t catch on.’

Readers of Shriver’s journalism and fiction will know she has become one of the most unforgiving critics of woke. Her latest book, Mania, imagines a society in which those beholden to this ideology fight against ‘cognitive discrimination’, insisting that everyone has the same intelligence level and that all qualifications and grades be abolished.

But she is right, in a way. Woke has indeed become a debased cliché. It’s often employed these days to apply to news stories that sound a bit barmy and ultra-leftwing.