One issue is that the woke fad constantly generates hot new buzzwords, such as "equity" and "racial reckoning, so taking your 2018 list and updating it to 2022 will always make it look like woke words are in decline when, perhaps, instead the old ones are being replaced with new ones.
You are hundred percent right. The problem is how do I update the list without unconsciously cherry picking? I need some sort of external source of ground truth.
Feb 20, 2023·edited Feb 20, 2023Liked by David Rozado
You could look at the contexts a bunch of words (e.g., racial equity, racial equality, racial justice, racial reckoning) are used in and have two raters rate how interchangeable the terms are within those contexts (i.e., without changing the meaning). I guess you'd need 10 or so extracts and then you could extrapolate. Then once established that they are highly similar / interchangeable for meaning in a given context (and the raters are have agreement and are reliable with one another), just group them together as one term.
Or just make a judgement about similarity of meaning. As long as you are being transparent (i.e., listing what the included words are in parenthesis) I don't see it as a problem. Not grouping them is more of a problem, given that terms come and go in terms of in vogue-ness...
Yup , looking at the data there are definitely some that are still rising like "whiteness".
Also I tend to wonder: if they feel they've "won" on some issues with their audience, perhaps they feel less of a need to focus on those words and will switch to a different set of words to beat people over the head about new issues. Why beat a dead horse if they think they've won on an old issue? If the non-woke make headway somewhere on old issues, especially if they somehow make headway with the more leftist NYT audience, there may be a resurgence of the words that are in decline now.
It's hard to make any sense of this data when language has been expanding so much in the internet era. I think a better metric for the expansion of our expression and understanding of social complexities would be the number of new terms in use to describe those phenomena, not the raw usage of a pre-selected set of terms.
Don't be fooled. All the negative push-back about "Woke" is just the patriarchy getting pissed off at having lost ground. Woke was originally shorthand for awareness of and support for all the good things accomplished over the past 60 years to undo just a smidge of the horrible misdeeds of centuries of White/Male/Anglo-Euro Patriarchy. It was a positive word. It described positive things. Those things are still positive, even though the culture warrior propagandists have succeeded in flipping the brand.
One issue is that the woke fad constantly generates hot new buzzwords, such as "equity" and "racial reckoning, so taking your 2018 list and updating it to 2022 will always make it look like woke words are in decline when, perhaps, instead the old ones are being replaced with new ones.
You are hundred percent right. The problem is how do I update the list without unconsciously cherry picking? I need some sort of external source of ground truth.
You could look at the contexts a bunch of words (e.g., racial equity, racial equality, racial justice, racial reckoning) are used in and have two raters rate how interchangeable the terms are within those contexts (i.e., without changing the meaning). I guess you'd need 10 or so extracts and then you could extrapolate. Then once established that they are highly similar / interchangeable for meaning in a given context (and the raters are have agreement and are reliable with one another), just group them together as one term.
Or just make a judgement about similarity of meaning. As long as you are being transparent (i.e., listing what the included words are in parenthesis) I don't see it as a problem. Not grouping them is more of a problem, given that terms come and go in terms of in vogue-ness...
Yup , looking at the data there are definitely some that are still rising like "whiteness".
Also I tend to wonder: if they feel they've "won" on some issues with their audience, perhaps they feel less of a need to focus on those words and will switch to a different set of words to beat people over the head about new issues. Why beat a dead horse if they think they've won on an old issue? If the non-woke make headway somewhere on old issues, especially if they somehow make headway with the more leftist NYT audience, there may be a resurgence of the words that are in decline now.
Thank you very much for making this freely available.
It's hard to make any sense of this data when language has been expanding so much in the internet era. I think a better metric for the expansion of our expression and understanding of social complexities would be the number of new terms in use to describe those phenomena, not the raw usage of a pre-selected set of terms.
Don't be fooled. All the negative push-back about "Woke" is just the patriarchy getting pissed off at having lost ground. Woke was originally shorthand for awareness of and support for all the good things accomplished over the past 60 years to undo just a smidge of the horrible misdeeds of centuries of White/Male/Anglo-Euro Patriarchy. It was a positive word. It described positive things. Those things are still positive, even though the culture warrior propagandists have succeeded in flipping the brand.
Mostly giong in the right directions.
Great chart. Wasnt' aware of it until Yuri Bezmenov showed it one of his Substack posts. - https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/trump-derangement-syndrome-diagnosis-dsm-v
Linking it today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Hey David, do you happen to have any graphs with the x-axis labeled to see the exact years? Or have you seen such a chart anywhere?