Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Gaslighting to Woke: Origins of Modern Buzzwords

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

What does it mean to be 'woke'? What did the bluesman Leadbelly mean when he coined the phrase? And what does a story set in Victorian London have to do with the term gaslighting?Joining Kate today is Robbie Morgan, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics at Leeds University, to chat about the buzzwords we use and how their meanings have changed for better and worse since they were first coined.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXT.You can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more with the show, but before any of us can proceed safely, I have to give you the fair do's warning, and here it is. This is an adult podcast book by adults to other adults

about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subject, and you should be an adult too. And if you are an adult, if you are a grown-up, maybe you could vote for us in the listener's choice awards at this year's British podcast awards, which you can do by going to, www.british podcast awards.com forward slash voting and clicking on Betwixt the Sheets.

And look at it this way. The sooner you do it, the sooner we win it, the sooner I can stop nagging you about it. Right, on with the show. The year is 1938. There's no married at first sight to be binging, so I thought I would treat myself to a night at the theatre. And I do love a night at the theatre for Twixters. I've just come from seeing this brand new play called Gaslight. It's a thriller set in Victorian London and tells the story of a husband who drives his wife to insanity

with trickery and deceit and not putting the fucking toilet seat down. All right, that doesn't happen, it's just a trickery and deceit. It's sagged a little in the second act for me, but aside from that, it's interesting to know that in the next century, people will bandy around the term gaslighting

based on this very play to describe what it's like when somebody tries to get you, to doubt your own sense of reality. And it's not just the word gaslighting that has a particularly interesting history. What about the word woke? That's a good one too.

Well, I am ready to find out where our modern buzzwords come from. Let's do this. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. I know we have had our fair-do's warning, Betwixters, but if you are woke and feeling triggered that your boundaries have been compromised,

well, you are in the right place. Because in today's episode, we are joined by Robbie Morgan, lecturer and consultant in applied ethics at Leeds University, And we're going to explore how terms such as woke, gaslighting and emotional labour all came about in the first place, how they've changed with time, and if they in themselves have become problematic through misuse. And if you like this episode and you want to hear more about the history of provocative words, do be sure to scroll back and check out our episode on the History of the Sea Word with Deborah Cameron.

Based on another history of swearing more broadly, it is fucking fantastic. Now without further ado, on with the show. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Robbie Morgan. How are you doing? Hi Kate, I'm great, thanks. I'm really excited to be here. I'm thrilled that you're here

because we're talking about one of the... It's such a fascinating subject, the power of words, how words change, how when a word changes, society changes around. Like, big things, Robbie. These are big 4 a.m. after too much beer kind of discussions. That was actually where the idea for the paper came from, fully enough. Yeah, yeah.

A lot of, a lot of, yeah, have a bottle of wine chatting about. What does this word mean? I'm going to assume that you are being typically self-deprecating because this is very serious academic work. But how did you get into this? Because you've published papers. And we'll talk about some of the words that you've focused on in a bit. how did you get into research studying the evolution of words?

So it actually came out a few years ago, well, at the outset of COVID, actually. So it was a weird time anyway. And I was teaching a course at the University of Sheffield on feminist philosophy. There were two different topics that I kind of taught in isolation. So one was, and I'm sure we'll talk about this a bit more, but epistemic injustice. So that's the idea that there can be injustice related to how we come to know stuff. and that can be kind of discriminatory in various ways.

So I was thinking about that and language comes up a lot there in terms of the way in which the language we have doesn't necessarily reflect everyone's experiences. And the reason it might not reflect our experiences might be to do with the kind of group we belong to. And the second thing I was looking at was pornography. And there's some philosophical feminist literature around pornography and the way in which, well, the way that some philosophers discussed it

is the way that can kind of silence some groups of people. And it really came from just putting these two things together and thinking, well, actually the way that language changes might also involve a certain kind of silencing might make it more difficult for us to say stuff. And when you think about it, a lot of what are called the culture was at the moment, they are being fought out along linguistic lines, aren't they? A lot of it is people fighting about, well, I think that this is what this word means and I think that this is what that word means. I think that's absolutely right. So I think one thing is just a lot of it is the debate is just about what these words mean.

But another is, I think often we can talk past each other because we don't even realize that's what's going on. So it's kind of, in some cases, it might look like there's a disagreement somewhere when in fact you delve into it. You think actually, really what's going on is people are just using the words in different ways and talking past each other in a way that's really unhelpful. Can you give me an example of that? See, this is because I'm talking and we're talking about words, but I need you to use the words to explain what the words mean. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So one that I've been thinking about that's recently been, I think an example of this is emotional labour. So this originally was coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild to be something very specific.

So what Hawkschschild's study was about was the way in which when people are at work, involved in paid work, in some roles, we have to put on a particular emotional front in order to affect how other people feel. So her big case study, or one of her big case of these, was about airline stewards and particularly female airline stewards who she said would have to, you know, be polite and friendly and smiley, even towards customers who are being rude or obnoxious or even aggressive. And emotion labor, as it was originally coined, meant controlling or managing one's own emotional state in order to affect the emotional state of other people. And that was a really helpful, precise term to describe something that was going on. But then over time, and this is particularly, I think, from about 2016, 2017 onwards,

you get quite a marked shift in the way that people are talking about emotional labor and particularly the things that people are saying in popular publications. So now it's used to mean kind of basically any work that's underappreciated and disproportionately performed by women. So housework has been called emotional labor, like organizing social activities, helping a partner or a friend kind of work through a difficult time. And Hochschild said, look, it's really important that way I acknowledge that work, but it's not emotional labor. And so you get this thing of people talking past each other. See, it's really interesting because on one, on the one hand, I think that like having that term emotional labor is very useful because it kind of made like people kind of go, hang on a minute, I am doing emotional labor. And perhaps they hadn't clicked that before. But they're not meaning it in the actual, they're not an airline stewardess attempting to just keep passengers.

as calm, are they? What they're doing is that like they are planning a friend's birthday and taking on a lot of emotional labour. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing because I think it's good that people can go, I'm doing emotional and sort of recognise that within themselves. What do you think? When that meaning becomes so broad, we lose something important, I think. We lose a way of referring to this kind of precise thing that's going on. But on the other hand, it's really good that we can identify that now there's all this kind of effort that people are putting in and that's underappreciated and it's underappreciated perhaps in various kind of gendered ways. We might think that more of this responsibility gets placed on

women, for example. It's really important that we have the language to discuss this. Maybe it's just a bit of a shame that the language that has evolved is a term that actually previously meant something else and so it muddies the waters there. It's a tricky balancing act, I guess. I suppose what is the kind of the danger of it is emotional labour. I've never heard that used in a positive context. I've never heard somebody go, I'm doing loads for emotional labour today. It's brilliant. It's always framed as it's a bad thing. You're doing emotional labour.

I'm doing emotional labour. And if we've kind of got to the point where if anything that you do that requires emotional work from you can be classed as emotional labour, has that diluted it? And you don't want to get to the point where it's like just doing something nice for somebody is like a bad thing that that's emotional labour. I think that's right. So there's a kind of concern about the way in which these list languages evolved to kind of communicate a particular perspective that's harmful. So in the original sense, emotional labour was referring just as something that was burdensome. And that seemed good because it's recognizing something that people did at work that required effort

and required skill. And one thing we might be able to do with that terminology is use it in workplace negotiations. So it's to say there is a particular skill we're doing. Emotional labor, we're managing our own emotional state. and that should be recognized because yes, that's burdensome. And then what's happened, I think, is as the term emotional labor has broadened, it's lost that distinctive meaning, but it still has that kind of, like you say, that solely negative valence.

So this is worried that, yeah, maybe there's a worry that it does describe things that, you know, part of everyday life could be quite positive. You're looking after a friend, supporting someone, kind of become negative. And this, I think, speaks to something else that's really interesting about language, which is that it can present things in a particular way, or it can present things in one perspective rather than another. So another example I've looked at, which is quite popular in the philosophical writing on this, is postpartum depression or postnatal depression. The term post-partout, right. Yeah. So this was a term that was coined by second wave

feminists. And I came across to the philosopher Miranda Fricker, who herself talks about it in the context of Susan Brown Miller's memoir about second wave feminism in our time. And an example she has is of a woman, Wendy Sanford, who was experiencing what we would now know as postnatal depression. But she hadn't come across that word. It wasn't a term that had been widely disseminated. So when Sanford was reflecting on that, she just thought that it was a personal failing. She blamed herself for all this awful experience she was having. And then she describes quite beautifully, this remarkable experience she has when she finally comes across the term postnatal depression at a consciousness raising workshop. And what she describes is a complete

shift in her perspective from seeing this as something that she is blameworthy for to seeing it as a medical condition. And a lot of what did that work was simply having a different term, because postnatal depression talks about that experience as a kind of medical thing rather than a personal thing. There's the very famous linguist Ferdinand Susserb, and I'm not going to quote him directly, but he said something along the lines of, language doesn't record the world, language creates the world. That's a very beard-strokey. Oh, that's very clever, Sasser. I'm sure you have done work on this. You know exactly what he means, but could you explain that a little bit? Because it's such a headbendy concept is that language isn't just a label that you

stick on something, it creates, it creates the world. Yeah, so there's this, this is really interesting question about, like, the way in which language influences the world. And I think what you're getting at is absolutely right. So the way that philosophers often kind of name this is hermeneutical injustice. That's the idea that the language might not exist for us to describe our experiences, but it's injustice because that's for, in a sense, political or social reasons. So why was there no word for postnatal depression before the 60s or 70s? Well, one hypothesis is because it's predominantly women experiencing this. So there's a kind of concern around, is it that our language reflects or obscures the experiences of certain groups? And another example that comes up a lot

is sexual harassment. So perhaps it's no accident that there wasn't a term for sexual harassment until the 70s. I didn't know there wasn't a term for sexual harassment until the 70s. Yeah, this is an interesting case that it comes out of very deliberate second-wave feminist organizing. where there's recognition like there's this thing going on, we need to develop a word from it. And again, Susan Brameler talks about the process of them collaboratively kind of just coming up with a word for this phenomenon. Coming up with a word for something.

So let's think of some other words that have kind of, I guess that they're big buzzwords at the moment. But oh, something like gaslighting. Yeah, so this is one of my favorites, partly because it is just so big at the moment. It is, isn't it? And like it's sort of everywhere. Everyone thinks they know what it means.

But I'm not absolutely sure that they do. I see a lot of confusion around it, but you take it away, Robbie. So this has a really fun history. So gaslighting started out referring to a specific kind of abuse. Paradigm case is in an intimate relationship where one person gains control over the other because they get them to doubt what they know about their world or their own perception or memory. So one partner might, you know, start hiding their partner's car keys. opening windows and stuff.

And when their partner says, oh, that's weird. I'm sure I left my keys there. I'm sure that I closed that window. The abusive partner might say, no, your mind is kind of playing tricks on you. And over time, of course, that could be extremely disorienting. Because if a person can't trust their own kind of perception or experiences, even if they get a sense they're not being treated fairly or justly, they're not going to believe that.

So it's a really kind of despicable but powerful form of abuse. The term actually comes from a play from 1938. called Gaslight, where the plot of that play is exactly this. So I think the names in the original play were Jack and Bella Manningham, a married couple, and Bella comes from a kind of a rich family, or I think it's her mother's inheritance is at stake. And so Jack starts convincing Bella that she's going mad, basically, that she's psychologically unwell, so that he can steal her mother's jewelry and artwork collection and so on. And the way that he does this is to convince her that she'd hidden her mother's necklace, that she'd taken the artwork down. So Jack can

convinces Bella that she doesn't have a reliable understanding of what's going on and that her experiences, her memory are playing tricks on her. And crucially, one of the things he does is cause the gas lights in her house to dim. So, you know, old-fashioned lights powered by gas. They can be dimmed. And so she started to think, God, it's going really dark. And Jack would say, no, it's not. I think your eyes are playing tricks on you. So that's where the name of the play comes from. But then also, of course, this term, gaslighting that we have. So given the fact that it, I mean, that that's not a recent film.

I mean, when did it suddenly, because it just sort of like launched itself into modern vernacular, it seems. And suddenly it was everywhere. Everyone was talking about gaslighting and no one had sat us down for a meeting and explained what it actually means. When did that happen?

So this is funny, because I agree there was this explosion, but actually it seems as though it was in circulation a while before. So I was kind of looking into it. And then, so after the film, gaslight, You get it kind of popping up every now and again, still with this, this kind of original meaning. Although, of course, by this point, no one says gaslight in the play gaslight. No. It became like the name for a form of abuse a bit later.

But interestingly, one thing I came across is that Snopes had done an investigation into kind of the first way in which this term was using that way. And they came across this brilliant story or excerpt from a Miami newspaper from 1948. And it's a piece about the reasons that wives were seeking a divorce from their husband. and it uses the phrase gave her the gaslight treatment. So we've not quite got into the term gaslighting, but they picked up on this, oh, what husbands are doing is like what the guy in the play was doing. And that was 48, so it hasn't just exploded.

It's been sort of a slow burn. Yeah, so you see it kind of peppered around, and it comes up then from the 1950s onwards in like media, especially TV programs seem to pick up on this quite a bit, a long time ago, academic work and popular psychology, start picking it up. You get this sense that's like, hey, this is a useful term for people in abusive relationships to talk about specifically what's going on. And we can imagine particularly a point where people might not be ready to name this as a kind of abuse to say, well, look, it's what's going on is kind of gaslighting.

And it's really useful to be able to name that phenomenon. Then in the mid-2010s, we get this real uptick. And of it being used both in kind of its original sense, but also just much more broad. It kind of comes to mean just kind of lying or misleading or even disagreeing with someone in popular writing. You get kind of politicians and political commentators starting to use it. And what you get is actually, you say kind of really quickly is just going from meaning something very precise to something just very broad. And I would say unhelpfully broad. We already have a word. We already have the world lying. I agree. I see it being used so many times and I always, that's not gaslighting. That's lying. That's just telling lies, which is bad enough and damaging enough.

But it isn't gaslighting, is it? So what's the difference between lying and gaslighting? So I guess gaslighting, it's definitely a type of lie, but it's doing something else. What's the difference? Yeah, so I think the key thing in gaslighting is that it is causing a person to doubt their own experiences or their own perception. And that's especially harrowing. That's going to be an especially harrowing experience. and it's going to be something that makes someone particularly vulnerable.

Like you say, it probably involves lying. There are other kinds of lying that do that. But equally, a lot of lying and disagreeing might not have much of an impact on us. Or if it does, it might have an impact on us in a very different way. So we've seen this recently where politicians talking about their opponents, kind of gaslighting the public. And if we're being very generous, we might say, well, what they're saying is that, say, the economy is going badly.

People are struggling. and you have this senior politician saying, no, it's not, everything's fine, you know, the public should basically doubt their own experiences about how they perceive the world. But I think really what's going on more likely is that politicians are just using it to mean lying, which is something much more general. And so what we've lost maybe is a word for this precise kind of abuse that I think could be very helpful if we're imagining, you know, someone developing, say, policy where they might want to kind of recognize a new criminal offence, really useful to have this specific term

in the popular consciousness or a kind of therapist or friend who recognizes that their patient or a loved one is going through this kind of specific thing. It's really useful for us to have this term as like a widespread thing where people know what it means. Just to be able to communicate about that effectively is really important. If gaslighting just comes to be another word for lying, it's a bit more difficult, I think, to do that. Lying is a politician saying, the economy's great. I don't know what you're worried about. That's just straightforward lying. Gaslighting would be more like The economy's great

I don't know what you're worried about You must be doing something wrong Yeah I think that's absolutely right Or like yeah you're You're not trying hard enough Yeah you think that you think that things are bad But in fact like yeah You just need to budget harder right

That's quite a one that comes out commonly It's more active than lying isn't it It's anything that kind of gets somebody To doubt their perception of the world Yes exactly So and I think what this makes up on is It doesn't have to necessarily be intimate relationships. I think that's the paradigm case, but there's other ways it's used. So

another place that it comes up is in medical contexts. So sometimes you see medical professionals, healthcare professionals, be accused of gaslighting, where often the examples revolve around, you know, someone might go in for a test and say, look, I'm having kind of these symptoms and it'll often be kind of a complex health condition or one that there's kind of less knowledge about. And the healthcare professional might dismiss them by saying like, oh no, like it's just your diet. Or it's just that you're drinking too much or whatever. Like, or even, and this is something again that is to just disproportionately experience by women, like, oh, it's all in your head. That chronic pain that you think you're feeling.

We've run the tests and like there's no reason that you would be feeling that. And in that case, it's not necessarily intentionally. It doesn't seem as what the doctor is doing is deliberately trying to get the person to like doubt their own perception of the world in order to get control over them or anything. But there's something very similar going on. It's just a bad diagnosis. Yes. It is a bad diagnosis. but what's interesting, I think, about it as a bad diagnosis is that it encourages the patient to doubt their own experience, right?

They know how their body feels and they know that something is wrong, but what they are being told is, no, you're just mistaken. That's very nuanced, isn't it? Because they do go away thinking, oh, I must be imagining it, but it's not a willful intent that gaslighting has to have. Yeah. And I think this is why it's so tricky to kind of work out what we want to say about the kind of the benefits and harms of language evolving because what we have there is the meaning of gaslighting is broadened slightly. So it's not in the context of an intimate relationship and it's not willful on the part of the professional, but it still seems like the core harm of gaslighting is present.

The thing we most worry about about gaslighting perhaps is that the person comes to doubt their ability to know things about the world and about themselves in a way that's really harmful. And that's still present in the medical case. I'll be back with Robbie after the short break. I've seen a lot of, not so much, well, they are medical terms, I suppose, but therapy speak, kind of seeping out into everyday use. And sometimes I hear it being used and I'm like, whoa, hang on a minute. I'm not sure that that's quite what you mean it is.

An interesting one is the word boundaries. I've heard that one, like trying to define what's a boundary. The point in case, I think it was Jonah Hill who came up with this list of the things. things is surf a girlfriend could and couldn't do and called them boundaries. And that set off this whole interesting thing about, well, what do you mean by a boundary? Yeah. That's a really interesting one where I think part of what's so fascinated where that one is, it's difficult, I think, to pinpoint the original meaning of that term. So certainly it seems like it's gotten broader in a way that's really unhelpful. It could be almost anything I don't like is my boundary. Yeah, I think that's what

it's grown to me. Now, since you see what you say about the reaction to that case because it shows that these moves are always contested. So we might think that the meaning of boundary has broadened, but equally something happens in the kind of cultural conversation where those moves can get challenged. So someone might, you know, coin a new meaning for a particular term or use a term and it's slightly broad away than before. And if that's unchallenged or it gets uptake, that it might stick. But the other thing that might happen is it just gets challenged and it gets kind of shut down. And that might be what's happening with boundaries. There's this kind of reaction to it that stops it becoming kind of so broad. But I think you're right. It seems as though one way in which

that gets used is like, if I don't like something, it's against my, you know, it's violating my boundaries in some way. And you get this in other cases as well, just pop up on social media, I guess, where people will say, are like, you know, a friend or family member reached out to me for help because they're having a hard time, but I have to have boundaries. And it seems like it's sort of missing something important about what's valuable about human relationships in terms of that kind of mutuality and just being there for each other. I wouldn't want to do it completely. I think the concept of boundaries is very important. But I think that the Jonah Hill thing for, you know, in my opinion, that was that term being appropriated and used as a form of coercive control.

Because whatever a boundary is, it's not about you trying to get somebody else's behavior to change. It should always be your own behavior. If he can't handle it. If he can't handle it, all that, the boundary should be wasn't in a relationship with her in the first place. That to me seems like the difference. A boundary is unresponsible for my behaviour, not trying to make someone else change theirs, I think. I think broadly that's right. I think there are going to be tricky cases around. So I think we could say truthfully that if someone having a relationship with reveals like very personal information about me to their friends, that what they're doing is crossing a boundary of mine, even though it's about their behaviour.

Yeah. So there's going to be, I think, tricky cases in terms of how to pin this down. But one issue might just be that there are some ethical implications to that term. We ought to respect each other's boundaries. Professional boundaries, very important. Yeah, good. So it expands kind of beyond the personal realm, right? And whatever we kind of mean by boundaries, it seems like it's going to be a condition that they ought to be respected.

If I say, you've crossed my boundaries, I've accused someone of doing something wrong. And so we might think that what's going on in these kind of other cases where people say, well, my boundaries include you not doing this thing, is that it's kind of making a moral claim on what someone else can do. It's saying that you doing this thing that doesn't really have anything to do with me is wronging me. Even though a boundary still refers to like, we might talk about it in terms of a person's like personal sphere, things that they are entitled to decide about. And the problem maybe there becomes when people say like, well, my boundaries extend around other people. So I get to decide what other people do. Maybe that's kind of what's going

wrong there. That seems to be. And it's really slippery because I guess you could say that that's a boundary, but also I could also say that this person's just being a dick. And you see that kind of, I know what you call it, like weaponised language around therapy terms in particular that get bandied around an awful lot. Another one that I see a lot on TikTok is narcissist. I see that being used all the time. And I want to sit him down and just go, oh, honey, you just dated a dickhead. That's what happened.

It happens to the best of us. Yeah. It's not narcissistic personality disorder. I think it's really interesting. So one is, like you say, this is kind of therapy speak or a lot of it is technical, kind of medical terms. Another is that a lot of these seem to have something to do with our emotional life. So like emotional labor we've talked about kind of very obviously. Narcissists is often that's discussed in terms of the way in which another person has like affected us emotionally.

Boundaries equally, you know, we talk a lot about emotional boundaries. So I'm putting these boundaries up because of kind of how I sort of feel. Yeah. I wonder if, and this is kind of kind of. of thinking as I go, but whether this kind of reflects something about, again, there is this urge or this need to have the language to communicate how we feel. There's something really important about communicating how we feel. The language is the tool that we used to do that. And so perhaps one of the reasons that it's kind of language that's relevant to that that gets changed so much

is there's almost this desperation to be able to communicate what we mean. Really quite extensively as well. And I definitely wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think it's great that we've got much more space and ability to communicate language. But when it's misused, especially therapy, medical terms, I don't know. I think that we are in danger of diluting it. Like other words, I've seen being used violence. I've seen that one being used quite a lot. Like this is an act of violence. It's like, it's not somebody was just a dickhead to you. That's not the same thing. Yeah, good. So I think violence is a really interesting term. A similar one that sometimes come up is depression. So that's a tricky one because it's not clear exactly what the

original meaning was. But again, this is both a psychological condition that's devastating and something that people say when they're sad. And the fact that people say it when they're feeling sad, it's going to make life more difficult for people who are actually experiencing depression, just in terms of communicating kind of how they're actually feeling and getting the kind of help that they need. And how serious it is. If you can say that you're depressed when you are, you know, you've had to be hospitalized and you're heavily medicated, that's depressed. But I can also say I'm depressed because I didn't get that thing on eBay that I wanted. It's like those things are not the same, but the word is the same.

And it comes with consequences. I think all these cases come with consequences. I do want to say, though, we touched on this in relation to emotional labour. Sometimes they have, I think, good consequences. Go on them. Hit me. It would be good to have some good consequences. So I've been thinking about a couple of cases. So one is the word queer, which...

That is an interesting word, isn't it? I'm within living memory that it was a bad word to say. I remember that when it was an offensive. You don't say that. In fact, I remember the transition when students be going, can we say that? I don't think we could say that. Yeah, so it's a really interesting word. And like you say, it's a living memory.

But where I think the change is probably good, I guess we should give some context. So actually, when I looked into this, it looks as though it's kind of always been contested. It's not the case that it was just like a slur and then got reclaimed. it was used in that kind of reclaimed way for a lot of the 20th century amongst, you know, the LGBT community. But the kind of dominant mainstream way it was used was just as a slur, as a homophobic, bifobic or transphobic slur for a person as a way of verbally attacking them. And then as you say it, then kind of got reclaimed and now refers, I think, more or less neutrally, possibly positively to the community that the word used to target. And I think that's a good thing for two reasons. The first is simply that it's just a useful term to refer to a group of people who you might want to kind of unite around a common word. And the other

is more complicated, but we've been talking a bit about how when terms change their meaning, something can be lost. So in gaslighting, a useful term for a kind of abuse is lost. And I think that's the same in the kind of case of queer, but it's a good thing. I don't think we're quite there yet because I think it still can be used as a slur. But perhaps if this process of reclamation occurs, one consequence, one possibility, not certain, but one possibility, is that people who want to attack this community

just lose one linguistic tool to do that. Yes. Yeah, it's been, the power's been taken out of the word. So let's finish off by talking about one of the biggest words that gets bandied around at the moment, that it's meaning shifts and changes and, and does all kinds of tricksy things. And that word is woke. Yes.

So I don't know what woke means now. I work on this. I'm like, is it good I'm woke? What's happening here? I think it's as close to meaningless as it's going to get. I think now if it has a meaning, I think the way it's often used is

that the person who's saying identifies themselves as having a particular political outlook. And then also like boo. There's a lot of boo, isn't there? Basically it means boo now. And there's not much more. content than that. It's pretty much just negative reaction without anything much more complex. Yeah. And it gets used in the press a lot and it's become a really shorthand way of just like signifying

what groups of people need to be angry about the people who get angry about it. And it's like woke universities do this, woke students do that, woke TV producers. And it's like it's not defined at all, but you know exactly what that article is going to be. about just by the use of that word. Yeah. I wonder if even we're losing that thread a bit now, where it's almost expanded to the point where it just means that the speaker or the author disagrees with the thing that they're calling woke.

I think the range of things that get called woke now means it's almost useless. It's just, the term is just hanging on. It tends to be liberal stuff, sort of the more left-leaning stuff. I've yet to hear anybody, I've yet to see a newspaper where they're talking about a right-wing pundit calling them woke, even if they're saying, something completely deranged. Woke Farage thinks that migrants should be banned from Britain. That's, it doesn't do that yet.

Yes. But it does just mean, I don't even know what it means anymore. No. So you're actually right. It reflects a particular political outlook on the part of the speaker, which itself is quite ill-defined. It's not clear how the person is endifying themselves, except in some extremely broad sense,

maybe quite small-sea conservative or right-of-centor or something like that. But the history is fascinating. I would have it's such a shame that this kind of word has been lost in this way, but on the other hand, at least it gives us an opportunity to look at a really interesting part of linguistic history. So as far as I could tell, the first instance of Woke was by the blues singer Leadbelly on a song of his called Scottsboro Boys, which was released in 1938, still on YouTube. It's been preserved. So this was used as a warning. And the context of Scottsbred Boys is this was a case in the United States, in the segregation,

so-called Jim Crow era, where there was, on the one hand, of course, there was like massive systemic legal discrimination. So the iconic pictures that we have of that era are, you know, segregated bathrooms, segregated swimming pools and so on. And it's just worth, I guess, bearing in mind, this is like recent, recent history. A lot of historians, I think, placed the kind of end of the Jim Crow era, either to the Supreme Court case that ended segregation in, in education. That was Brown v. Board. That was in the mid-50s or the Civil Rights Act, which was the mid-s So this is recent, you know, 20th century history. Really recent.

Yeah. Yeah. So on the one hand, there was this systemic legal discrimination, but on the other hand, it was just extremely dangerous to be African American in the United States in this time period. And what you often had were African American people, often kind of boys and men, accused of a crime. They would then be convicted by an all-white jury on very spurious evidence. And then often what would happen afterwards is, is tragically, a mob would murder.

the accused who then had been kind of convicted. This was kind of very frequent. It was, it was a really kind of significant and it was just something that was kind of going on in the country at that time. So what Ledbelly is referring to in the case of Scottshire Boys is a case like this where there were nine black teenagers. I think most of them were kind of legally adults, but at least one was legally a child, who were accused of assaulting two white women on a train and they were found guilty by an all-white jury. There were various kind of problems with the evidence and the way that the trial proceeded. So there were various retrials were ordered. During that period, one of the complainants retracted her testimony and said, actually, no, that didn't happen. But the defendants were still

found guilty at subsequent trials. The last of the alleged perpetrators, the last of these teenagers who'd been found guilty was cleared with a posthumous pardon in 2013. So very recent, But essentially in the end, all of these people were found not guilty of what they've been accused of. And some of them served kind of lengthy prison sentences as well. So Ledbelly was talking about the Scottsburgh case at the time where I think they'd kind of been arrested or tried, but it was kind of ongoing. It was still in the popular consciousness. And what he said was anyone kind of going through that area, stay woke. And so as I interpret that it was basically a warning to fellow African Americans that like the United States, particular areas of the United States,

are particularly dangerous. So essentially, I think what he was saying was kind of watch your back. Just be really careful. Be really aware of what it's like to be black in the United States at this time. If you're traveling to pick your areas, just be really wary of what's going on. So it started off as a warning. And then it slightly changed its meaning, but really, I think, stayed true to what Led Belly was saying to refer to the person who has heeded that warning. So to stay woke, to be woke would mean, I think be aware of like systemic racist injustice. but in particular to be aware of that as like approximate threat. So it's not just being aware of racism as like this abstract thing,

but being aware of it as someone who might be targeted by or is at risk of being targeted by violent racism as like something that could happen. And kind of organising one's community to take proactive kind of self-defense type steps. We might think that that's kind of a lot of what the civil rights movement were doing, particularly maybe the Black Panthers were doing in organizing their communities was a way of of being woke, of being really aware of racism, not just as this abstract thing, but as something that affects the kind of everyday lives of people and presents a sort of violent threat. So has this kind of really rich history as a term.

And then what you... A really important word. Absolutely. But then we don't jump straight from there to the kind of current meaning. There's a kind of intermediate step where it expanded to just being any position considered like socially liberal or progressive, where it was still kind of positive or neutral, but we'd already, I think, lost that kind of distinctive meaning. So in the kind of Black Lives Matter protests, I think it kind of got used a lot. But already at that point, even though that was a protest

about kind of racism and civil rights, it was being used kind of much more generally, I think, than what African American communities in the mid-20th century were kind of meant by it. And then, as we said, then it just became negative, referring negatively, I guess, to progressive causes. I think it has some parallels with politically correct. I was just thinking that, because I met before. everything was woke, it was, oh, political correctness gone mad. It's been like this bugbear of the right wing press is the things that they can and can't say for a very, very, and I'm sure there'll have been something before political correctness. I'm just not sure as well. I was wondering this.

I did wonder if right on might have been not, I don't think it was quite as mainstream, but I think that was possibly a bit of a precursor to politically correct. Maybe it just burnt out. Maybe woke will do the same thing. But political correctness is kind of the same thing because at its core, that's not a bad thing. I think it's actually a better word than woke. I think that it actually encapsulates more of what people are trying to do with it. Not that I want to bring any of it back. But, Robin, you have been wonderful to talk to it today.

And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Thanks very much, Kate. So I have a personal philosophy web page at morganphilosophy.weebly.com. Brilliant. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been a treat. Thanks very much, Kate. I've had a great time talking about the history of these words and how it can be harmful.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Robbie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the history of celibacy to the history of grief, all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast, by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.