All Those Tornadoes Predicted Due To Global Warming? Never Mind -- At Least Not In Minnesota; Bill Maher: He Be Woke -- April 13, 2019

From a reader:

Uff-da.

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The Language Page

I was reminded of this late last night when I saw this banner/headline over at Fox News:

The word has been around, like, forever.

From wiki:

Woke is a political term of African American origin that refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African American Vernacular English expression "stay woke", whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But it's been around forever:

Oxford Dictionaries records early politically conscious usage in 1962 in the article "If You're Woke You Dig It" by William Melvin Kelley in The New York Times and in the 1971 play Garvey Lives! by Barry Beckham ("I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon help him wake up other black folk.") – Garvey had himself exhorted his early 20th century audiences, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!"

Earlier, J. Saunders Redding recorded a comment from an African American United Mine Workers official in 1940 ("Let me tell you buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer.")

Lead Belly uses the phrase near the end of the recording of his 1938 song, Scottsboro Boys, while explaining about the namesake incident, saying "I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go along through there, stay woke, keep their eyes open."

African American Vernacular English?

Steven Pinker discusses African American Vernacular English in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.

Very early in the book, starting on page 29, Pinker discusses the grammar of "the dialect called Black English Vernacular (BEV)." Referencing dialogue by "Larry," Pinker writes:

The most linguistically interesting thing about the dialect is how linguistically uninteresting it is: if [the linguist William] Labov did not have to call attention to it to debunk the claim that ghetto children lack true linguistic competence, it would have been filed away as just another language. Where Standard American English (SAE) uses there as a meaningless dummy subject for the copula, BEV uses it as a meaningless dummy subject for the copula (compare SAE's There's really a God with Larry's It's really a God).

Larry's negative concord (You ain't goin' to no heaven) is seen in many languages, such as French (ne ... pas). Like speakers of SAE, Larry inverts subjects and auxiliaries in nondeclarative sentences, but the exact set of the sentence types allowing inversion differs slightly.

Larry and other BEV speakers invert subjects and auxiliaries in negative main clauses like Don't nobody know? and a few other sentence types.

BEV allows its speakers the option of deleting copulas (If you bad); this is not random laziness but a systematic rule that is virtually identical to the contraction rule in SAE that reduces He is to He's.

With regard to Bill Maher, it appears he be woke. He is certainly woke on the immigration issue but in most other regards he be sleeping.

By the way, remember all that political talk about "dog whistles"? "Woke" is the very same thing: a dog whistle.

Don't you just love this stuff?