Let us start with etymology. It's widely accepted that 'woke' began life as African American Vernacular in about the 1940s, and referred to the state of being awake, aware, socially and politically conscious. This century, it resurged with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, through the end of the previous decade to the start of this one, it's been a word of two minds:

1. The original mind, awareness and consciousness of social and political reality and injustice.
2. The counter-mind, a word used to mock anything seen as over-sensitive, -progressive, politically correct.¹ ² ⁴

Now the problem with "reclaiming" words is that it usually goes the other way around. The word is first an insult, and then a term embraced by the community it is used to disparage (See the n-word, queer, geek/nerd, punk).⁵ ⁸ So, in the case of woke, the word wasn't really reclaimed. It was just claimed. The users of the original mind, however, kept tugging.

The response of a word not so easily relinquished by those from whom it is being poached is an interesting thing. There are multiple stages of this response: one where both uses of the word exist in almost equal usage, a surge in use of either form, the spawning of variants, a transformation of the word's spelling, pronunciation, and sometimes meaning (See punk and the N-word).¹ ⁵ ⁷ ⁸ At some point, it becomes only socially acceptable to use the word in a certain way. Try calling someone a geek or punk (or the N-word if you’re white) as an insult; see how well it goes for you. However, in the case of woke, the anti-woke were intent on using woke as an insult. And therein lies another problem:

What is woke?

Unlike a black person, woke is not something tangible you can point to and hate. So woke became everything the other side of the political and social spectrum stood for. Woke became the new faces on TV that were "ruining the entertainment industry!" Woke became the new ads that featured people who were not thin, ripped and "normal." When it became up to anybody to define woke for the purpose of disparaging it, woke became every new thing anybody did not like, and "new" meant "anything I wasn't aware of until now."¹ ² ⁴

Now, unlike in previous eras, we don't just have one group of people in one part of the world who mis-define a word for their own purposes. We have the internet. Woke sped through its etymological evolution like me through a Twitter comment section.¹ Today, we have woke as the antithesis of Sean Dyche (which is what this article is about; sorry it took a while to get here).

There’s a meme that originated on football Twitter. “Utter woke nonsense” is the name. Some people (read as fans of English football) find themselves longing for a return to the true old Northern European tradition of hoofball. Where someone hits the ball long for the big striker in the middle to chase. When he gets to it before the defenders, he hoofs it towards the post. The goalkeeper either catches it or doesn’t. Pure football. 4-4-2. None of this 'woke' possession-based, tactics and counter-tactics, changing formations, false-9, inverted wingbacks, ball-playing goalkeeper nonsense. None of these Pep Guardiola-type coaches creeping through “my football.” A manager that plays utterly straightforward football I can get behind. Preferably English. Sean Dyche. Heck yeah!

If you can’t already tell, football Twitter is a severely unserious place. These fans are (mostly) joking, having fun, and being nostalgic for a time they don’t seriously want to return to. If it was their team playing modern football and trashing everyone else, you wouldn’t hear a lick of complaint. Mostly they’re just waiting for football to “evolve again, already.” 

Sean Dyche is known for his direct playing style, a style that works, and his recent success keeping Everton out of relegation has helped mend the reputation of the English football manager (only four out of twenty managers in English top-flight football at the end of last season were English).¹⁰ ⁹ When you can stretch the definition of woke like you can now, you can make a man like Sean Dyche (who called for the vaccination of all Premier League players during the COVID pandemic) as its antithesis.⁶

This meme exemplifies the stunning result of woke’s evolution as an insult, ergo you can’t ever use it seriously. “Utter woke nonsense” is a meme you can only really use with some degree of irony and for the propagation of hilarity. For laughs. Anyone who shakes their fist at a modern football match, dead serious, and cries utter woke nonsense will get laughter as a response. It is using woke as an insult, but the only way you can use it nowadays. Perhaps, the only way you can use it ever?

We’ll see.

Now, I feel I must add, Sean Dyche hasn’t ever actually said “utter woke nonsense.” At least, I could not find any record of him doing so. It’s just a meme with his face on it that, in that amusing and sometimes frustratingly insightful way, seems to capture his football philosophy better than anything he’s actually said or done. Another thing it captures is woke’s current, if not final, form. It's like the word  "punk." If you use it unironically as an insult, it paints a picture of you better than it does the other guy. I mean, who calls someone a punk? I've got an image of someone who does in my head, and I can't take them seriously.

References

1. Allen ND. The misappropriation of “woke”: discriminatory social media practices, contributory injustice and context collapse. Synthese. 2023 Aug 30;202(3):84.
2. Cammaerts B. The abnormalisation of social justice: The ‘anti-woke culture war’discourse in the UK. Discourse & Society. 2022 Nov;33(6):730-43.
3. Davies HC, MacRae SE. An anatomy of the British war on woke. Race & Class. 2023 Oct;65(2):3-54.
4. Dhoest A, Paulussen S. The mediated construction of “woke”: Emerging discourses and primary definers in the Flemish press. Journalism. 2024:14648849241260942.
5. Jones T, Hall C. Grammatical Reanalysis and the multiple N-words in African American English. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage. 2019 Nov 1;94(4):478-512.
6. Media PA. Burnley’s Sean Dyche says footballers’ vaccinations should be “fast-tracked.” The Guardian [Internet]. 2021 Jan 7 [cited 2024 Jul 17]; Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jan/07/burnley-manager-sean-dyche-footballers-vaccinations-fast-tracked-nhs
7. Peters JD. Metonymy in the Evolution of Meaning. InDeseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium 1980 (Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 16).
8. Popa-Wyatt M. Reclamation: Taking back control of words. grazer philosophische studien. 2020 Mar 4;97(1):159-76.
9. Premier League Managers - Overview & Stats 2024/25 & archive [Internet]. [cited 2024 Jul 17]. Available from: https://www.premierleague.com/managers?se=578&cl=-1
10. xfcedi. Sean Dyche’s Everton Tactics [Internet]. FootballCoin.io. 2023 [cited 2024 Jul 17]. Available from: https://www.footballcoin.io/blog/sean-dyche-everton-tactics-2023/
11. Meme sourced from Twitter (X.com). Original creator could not be identified.