Red Rover, Red Rover, Please Send Whatever-the-Opposite-of-Woke-Is Right Over

And Other Dumb Games Adults Play

In 1986, I was fourteen and taking a mandatory typing course on a computer the size of a garbage truck. When I wasn’t in class, I sometimes had an urge to air-type words after hearing them in a conversation. Not all words, but the ones that clicked in my pubescent brain. 

If you’re imagining an air-guitar solo, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t slide through a room on my knees typing “perpendicular,” but I did like the word perpendicular, and I pecked it out on an imaginary typewriter after my dad said it. Along with asinine and pumpernickel. Obviously.

“That’s a little weird,” my dad said. As if I wasn’t already the kind of teenager who thought Robert Frost was a hot topic and played with her own ear wax. Air-typing was the least uncool thing about me.

I’ve always been interested in language, and one of the worst fights I ever had with my husband was a bitter, soul-shattering conflict over “anyways” versus “anyway.” In fact, I’m more than interested, I’m a grammatical Pharisee of the first order. I actually experience physical pain when overused words are pronounced in my presence. 

I even moved to Italy so I’d never have to hear the word “bandwidth” again, and the first year was bliss. Not only because the region of Calabria invented a hot red paste called nduja that will make you weep and speak in tongues at the same time (and you can order it on PIZZA), but also because I never heard English and didn’t understand Italian. I was cliché-proof.

Though it wasn’t a great plan in the end, because I now understand clichés in two languages. I learned that in Italy there are more testicle-related clichés than shapes of pasta. For instance, you’re not in my way, you’re between my testicles. That girl isn’t high maintenance, she’s a testicle-bender (one of the lesser known powers of an Avatar). I’m not a dangerously distracted airhead, I’m testicled. 

I will magnanimously forgive the Italians for their cliches, because they invented nduja. In English, however, (and especially online) a few trendy gems have reached such an unbearable level of repetition that they give me facial spasms, and I suspect I’m not alone. Something has to be done. Silence is complicity. It’s time to speak out. It’s time to lock the worst offenders (not the people, the words) in a hall of fame and never use them again.

Here are a few we could start with and I’ll tell you why:

1. Gaslighting

   Let’s please be done with this one. Chances are, no one has ever gaslit you. Are you a child star with a diabolical guardian? Married to William Hearst? Living in a Hitchcock movie? If you answered yes to any of these, email me immediately.

2. Selfie 

   Well, more specifically selfie stick, which sounds like something that should come with batteries and make your husband feel inadequate.

3. Snowflake

   If people are losing their minds about your obviously brilliant comment because they’re fragile internet crybabies (what other explanation could there be?), try an original metaphor for fragility. Such as: liberal taco shell, conservative dandelion puff, Bernie-bro-donkey-tail succulent.

4. Haters

   I’m not saying there aren’t undead human locusts hanging around comments and subreddits, but calling them haters makes you sound like a petulant teenybopper (pro tip: using words like teenybopper will make you sound more mature). 

5. Woke

   Obviously this is the one I really want to talk about.  Woke has not only been hammered into meaningless oblivion, it’s become a schoolyard game led by bullies, with pretty much the whole planet joining one team or the other. Comedian Jon Stewart recently mentioned that the world used to be largely divided into Communist and anti-Communist countries. Now, (my paraphrase) the great dividing line is woke and anti-woke. 

I get it that woke started as a way to talk about systemic racism, and I think you have to work really hard to ignore the reality that black folks have always had it harder in America and still do. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up black, but I can imagine why you’d want a word for people who acknowledge huge injustices toward your community.

I do know what it’s like to grow up in a culture where women weren’t allowed to speak publicly at church. I know what it’s like to live in a world where male is the prototype, the default pronoun, and where virtually no one can name a female sculptor, inventor or philosopher before the year 1850. If you tell me there’s no systemic patriarchy, my instinct is to rip your chest hairs out.

But I think that when woke went beyond black communities and became a liberal scout badge for kombucha-slurping yogis everywhere, it suddenly came to mean something uglier. It came to mean, “I’m not a deplorable the way some people are.” 

Then, on the other side of the playground, anti-wokers like Ron DeSantis got a hold of the badge, and started slapping it on all manner of weird items: math, libraries, bathrooms, and of course, laws—laws banning the mention of racism in schools.

Now, woke and whatever-the-opposite-of-woke-is really just mean one thing. You’re not part of my tribe. And girl, am I tired of tribes. Tribes are the opposite of real conversation, kindness and curiosity. We end up defending horrible, indefensible things because our tribe has to be right. We end up defending horrible people.

So I guess this is a let’s-all-get-along post. But it’s also a my-ears-are-bleeding post. I don’t have a congress that can pop out new laws like DeSantis does, but I was thinking we could agree on communal punishments for folks still slinging the word at each other. 

I propose this. If you love wokeness and use the word, for a year you should have to eat Tyson chicken nuggets in plastic containers with extra BPA and drink multi-origin coffee. If you hate wokeness, for a year you should have to eat vegan cheese and read Hillary’s emails.

Be nice.