Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/03/libs-of-tiktok-founder-laughed-at-when-she-speaks-about-wokeness-and-then-cant-define-it-video.html
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He didn’t do much better because his definition was something like “people who attack America,” prompting the retort “so Al Qaeda is woke?”
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That stings particularly hard when Al Qaeda is (almost) literally ‘based’.
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Because in both cases, their definition is “doubleplusungood”.
They read 1984 and thought O’Brien was the hero.
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“Normalacy?” Have these people even been to school?
I also really want to know about the “wokeness” she witnessed at the grocery store. What does that mean? Are the cantaloupes gay?
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“Is wokeness here in the room with us now?”
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And stochastic terrorists.
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“I don’t understand & can’t define this thing I hate, and that makes me hate it all the more!” - Chaya Raichik, probably.
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Raichik: (immediately points at nearest Black person)
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Hey, now. I pronounce it that way, as did everyone I knew growing up. Might be a Minnesota thing. Or not. Not that we had much call to use the word, mind you. I also say “eye-ther” and “nigh-ther” and speak in a rapid, clipped manner which is distinctly not a Minnewegian accent.
Plenty of stupid to call Raichik out for (such as not having an answer to a “gotcha” question that’s been around for more than two years) without going after accents and dialects. 
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I’m fully of the opinion that language, especially English, is defined by its usage rather than by written rules. So if that’s a regional variant of normalcy, so be it. I am 55 years old and I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it that way, so it stood out to me in the video. And this is the second time in a week I’ve heard some right wing asshat do something like this (mispronounce or misuse a word…I can’t remember the other one now). I will point out that Raichik is from Los Angeles and Brooklyn, and I’m pretty sure that regionalism isn’t at all common there.
Also, as a side note, I’m assuming “normalacy” comes from a combining of “normalcy” and “normality”? Linguistics can be pretty interesting sometimes.
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It’s increasingly clear that “woke” is the fascists’ shorthand for “educated critical thinker”.
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No harm, no foul. 
I fully recognize that it is either a corruption of normalcy, or a portmanteau as you suggested. Based on nothing more scientific than my own experience I believe it to be a corruption. Unfamiliar words, phonemes, spellings, and structures can lead to pronunciation errors as we try to fit words into familiar structures. This is most pronounced in names and place names (i.e. eye-rack vs ih-rock). I am as guilty of that as anyone — for the longest time I call a certain insect a “kikada” instead of “sic-kada,” and am not sure it shouldn’t actually be a “sic-kay-da”. 
Indeed! 
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It’s not hard to define. It’s almost impossible to find someone who hasn’t had a ‘woke’ moment even.
Case: growing up it was common for us in the liberal mecca of Connecticut to call someone who took something back they had given to you an ‘Indian giver’ - this all your life growing up hearing people say this and using it as part of your normal. Then one day you say it, think it or otherwise have the phrase come up and you stop - and realize just how horribly racist that phrase is. Congratulations, you’ve had a ‘woke’ moment - you just realized that you were being racist all your life without realizing it, or even caring.
That’s systemic racism - that is the ‘normality’ of a phrase, or action that hurts a group that is so common as to not stick out. Even in a society that outright fought against outwardly disgusting groups like the KKK - being woke is finding out you do things that are hurtful, and you might not know.
It’s ok to have been wrong in life, ‘woke’ is much like a Catholic confession - it allows self forgiveness if you can admit what you did wrong and correct the behavior. I mean you can’t start to heal until you can start to see the problem to begin with.
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Yes, “empathetic” can be added to the list of the “woke” qualities they find so offensive.
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Be happy: If you told that to an ancient Roman, they might have understood, as you were pronouncing with the supposedly correct classical Latin pronunciation!
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Isn’t “woke” just a dumbed down version of the hater phrase “politically correct” from 30 years ago?
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It’s been around much longer than that term. White people have just discovered it recently.
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