A Spec in Time Series

June blog 2025

My brain sucks so much. It hears things – turns them over, looks at them, examining every crease as it tosses that thing around. Thoughts, ideas, criticisms, and the like. All types of contemplation over one singular word could carry on in my head for years and years. Sometimes, they become a long-standing underlying thing that burrows into my head. Sometimes it’s an all-encompassing thought until that eureka moment. Either way, it takes up time as it creates a tome in my head.

An example of fast and furious thoughts over a word that was once tumbling was a song by Alanis Morissette; ‘isn’t it ironic?’ – I think not. The only thing ironic about the lyrics was that there were no real examples of irony. Perhaps that was her plan and point, not my job to know these things. Years later, I heard a word nerd tear apart this song, saying that there were no statements of irony in the song, sans one possible stretch. After listening to his analysis, all I could do was pat myself on the back and laugh as he never mentioned the irony of a song about irony not having any irony. I truly hope that was the point, I love that type of humor.

More recently, it has been the unprecedented use of the word unprecedented.  It’s downright annoying. We are into that ‘little boy who cried wolf’ territory with that word right now. Worse than that, we have arrived at the point where it means nothing. If everything is unprecedented, nothing is. If the pace of this word usage doesn’t slow down, it will literally fall into the same position in our language as the usage of the word ‘literally”. Don’t get me started with that word, as I literally grit my teeth every time I hear it used incorrectly.

On the other hand, I’m glad that some of these words have been pulled out of obscurity. It’s fun, at first, to see peeps brains explode when confronted with a lost word, resuscitated into the common vernacular. Even altogether new words and repurposed words can be tricky and fun to bring back into use. Language will continue to evolve, and should continue to. Verbs becoming nouns has always been a favorite of mine, right up there with new contractions and word mashups. Funny enough, this can be my biggest problem when writing in Spec’s voice. “wou’dencha’kno”. It makes me “anxtipated” at times.

Now, for a word that I’ve been struggling with for many years. Yes, all of this writing has been to get to a single word and the point of this word’s meaning and usage. Perhaps more so, its usage as a noun, not an adjective or verb. It’s the past tense of the usual action verb changed into a noun. That is what my brain has been forced to accept.

A word that has rarely been used without an (a) preceding it for hundreds of Shakespearian years prior to this last decade. Or, more recently, followed by the word (up). A sleeping beauty of a word, held in by a maiden in a box, hidden in the deep forest of our subconscious. A word that arose from a human need for safety and awareness of our surroundings. After all, there might be three bears in that house eating porridge.  

One morning, I woke up to the news telling me to go back to sleep. I arose out of my slumbers to the knowledge that being woke was now negatively applied, yet I could not go back to sleep as the snooze button on my alarm clock is worn out.

Woke in its raw usage is an active descriptive of coming into the period of time that one is not sleeping. Awake, we are conscious and aware of our surroundings. We can protect ourselves from perceived danger and acquire the information we need to survive. It is the personification of our learning from and interacting with life. According to the OED, which is, as you know, my ultimate source of definitions, Personification is the symbolic representation of a thing or abstraction by a human. We are awake after we have become woke.

Why did this word become such a stupid dividing line in our political landscape? The word defining them and us? Why is it so offensive to some now? Woke is now so divisive that it has managed to creep into every aspect (at least in the USA) of life. The word ‘woke’ is not even political anymore. In what I feel is possibly the most upside-down usage of the word ‘woke’ today is the ways it is used within our religious communities. We all need to remember that religiously it would seem to mean: one who sought the truth, found it, then awoke to it. Examples would be: Zeus, Jesus, Odin, Buddha, Mohamed, and my favorite, Artemis, to name a few. Are our institutions forgetting that their gods were the original ‘woke’ examples?

What happens in the future? How will ‘woke’ continue to evolve? Over my lifetime, I have noticed negative words being flipped into a positive, and as our prime example shows, the opposite has been proven true. Touchy words have also been reclaimed by the groups they were used as a slur against. For example, queer has been taken from a nasty slur and is now worn with pride. Is the word woke on its way to becoming the W word alongside the N word, or the C* word? Words only people from that group can use? Will those of us who get up for work at 7pm or 1am take back ‘woke’ to define the time when we get out of bed?

I feel that I am woke in many ways. I got out of bed today, I am typing, I’m correcting that typing. I am using words that may be above a third-grade reading level while still keeping it real. I’m aware of the struggles of those around me. I’m aware of what it takes to keep food on my table and clothing on my body. I know what country my laptop was made in and the labor that was needed to make it work.

Mostly, I am thankful for every one of the examples, experiences, and people who made me think. I was taught well by my elders, my teachers, and the kid down the street. Thinking is not a bad thing: it is not ‘woke’, it is why we are here, on this planet, at this time of wealth. If you are not woke, I hope you have a blanket to keep you warm and a roof over your head to keep you dry. If not, I promise to keep doing my best to help you, because I see you, my heart and eyes are open.