What’s the opposite of woke?

Amazing what a single letter can do. Change just one vowel in Caitlin Moran’s surname, and you get an aptronym, a name that suits its owner perfectly.

The Times columnist invites such a misspelling with every word she writes. This time, in her article Duh! Of Course I Am Woke, she set out first to define such terms as ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’, and then to announce how proud she is to be both.

Thus a liberal is to her someone who is “willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas”.

Words these days mean whatever we want them to mean – Humpty Dumpty’s approach to lexicology has triumphed. And few words are as open to falsification as ‘liberal’ and all its cognates.

For example, Miss Moran’s liberalism and that of “the metropolitan liberal elite”, to which she is proud to belong, is exactly, diametrically opposite to the definition she puts forth. This she proves by providing a synonym of ‘liberal’, which is ‘woke’, and also suggesting a few antonyms.

To begin with, she enlists the help of “national treasure Kathy Burke”, some kind of actress, who “put it succinctly on Twitter, ‘I love being woke. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant f***ing twat’.”

Having thus established a solid, if borrowed, base of operations, Miss Moran mounted her own foray into pseudo-nominalism. The only alternative to wokery is to her being “a raging racist, homophobic, transphobic, woman-hating antisemite”.

So much for willingness “to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own”. So much also for basic decency, intelligence and education.

Rather than accepting the expression ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ as pejorative, Miss Moran sees it as a term of praise, something to be proud of: “And as for ‘elite’? Well, cheers! I graciously accept the compliment! I worked my knackers off on the journey from a council estate to The Times, so thank you for noticing.”

She may have joined the elite, as it’s defined today, professionally and financially. But culturally and intellectually, she is still mired in the council estate of the mind, or rather the gutter running through it.

“How could any of this be an insult? You might as well start shouting about a ‘City-dwelling reasonable success person’.”

‘Liberal elite’ is an ironic term, used by sensible people to describe a small group of trend-setters in our rapidly degenerating world. We tend to look for words that define and elucidate, not just demonise.

Yet the likes of Miss Moran refuse, perhaps are unable, to understand irony. In fact, they are unable to understand just about anything, and certainly not anyone who despises them and every fake virtue they proclaim as real.

This illiterate hack has figured us out: “Most ‘anti-woke’ warriors tend to be slightly scared, ageing people who don’t like young people changing all the words all the time – because it makes them feel out of touch – and who are playing to a gallery of similarly confused and tetchy people for viewing figures and/or votes.”

Slightly scared? I am terrified of the wanton destruction of everything sublime, beautiful and graceful perpetrated by fascisoid ignoramuses out to annihilate things they can’t understand. Each of them is a naked savage who turns a Stradivarius violin this way and that, only to decide that the best use for it is to kindle a pyre around which he could perform his ritual gyrations.

Savages like Moran look at history’s greatest civilisation and see nothing in it except racism, colonialism, oppression and a commitment to destroying ‘our planet’. These sins are to them irredeemable, and they are certainly not offset by any achievements.

They then take those awful things and use them to define their own world, with the minus sign attached to each. They are anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-this, anti-that.

Real virtues are thus ousted by fake ones, based on all these antis. That leaves no one in doubt of what they hate, but real virtue proceeds from love, not hate.

What is it that they love then? Well, themselves of course, what else. They “work their knackers off” to turn everything good, like the formerly great newspaper The Times, into the sort of thing that sticks to your shoe sole, making it stink on a hot day. And they are proud of it.

Rather than being open to ideas and respecting other people’s opinions, they indulge their powerlust by stamping into the same substance everybody and everything that contradicts their hare-brained notions.

Their woke ‘liberalism’ begets cancel culture, the cudgel with which they bust recalcitrant heads. Miss Moran’s scurrilous piece represents another swing of that weapon, but it misses its target. Instead it turns into a boomerang, smashing her own smug face.

She is right about one thing though, inadvertently letting the cat out of the bag. The cudgel is, for the time being, verbal. The stormtroopers of the fascisoid world created by the likes of her are indeed “changing all the words all the time”.

That’s Humpty-Dumpty all over again, a tyrant putting his foot down:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, along with many great thinkers, knew that whoever gains control of language will become a master of minds as well. And the best way to control words is to deprive them of any real meaning.

This realisation lies at the root of every modern, fascistic tyranny. And when one such vanquishes, the victors no longer have to conceal their true aims and ways of achieving them. That’s a telltale sign: when they start to speak frankly, you know they have won.

Thus Miss Moran’s piece is indeed a triumphant ritual dance around the fire consuming a great civilisation. Except that she may be too moronic to realise this.