Woke and Woken

Definitions swirl yet they mean much the same. Awaken. Waken. Woke. Awoke. And then there is the political woke.

I awakened some year back feeling uncomfortable with the word woke. I always used it in the sense of woke up, or I awakened. That led me to question the ‘a’ that often appears at the front of woke as in awoke or wake as in awaken. Does the ‘a’ signify the action being done to another person as opposed by the person him/herself? Or am I overcomplicating it?

Woke as a political term means being sensitive to injustice in the world, like racism, discrimination of all sorts, that sort of thing. I am woke, I suppose. I am attuned to the injustices people cause others. It bothers me. It is something that has always called to me to fix.

Then again, I do not use this term for myself. I understand that people think of me as woke, but I still think the application of the word is unseemly or something.

‘I woke up in the morning.’ That sentence is comfortable for me. Or ‘I awakened to a sunny day.’ Woke is not a word I use alone. It usually is paired with ‘up.’ And then there is the 'a', to be or not to be used.

And so it goes. I often think of this oddity in our language. Why do we have such words with moving definitions?  Sort of like declensions of a verb, or is that a noun? My Latin fails me; it has been too many years. Going through my head, however, I come up with wake, woke, wuck. I know it is wrong. Very wrong.  There is no such word as wuck, but then I wuck up one morning and pondered the truth of that statement.

Is there any?

December 15, 2022

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