By 2018, the Urban Dictionary had a new definition: ‘t he act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue . Workers are divided ‘according to identity, overriding social class and empowering employers to act as neutral, therapeutic arbiters in workplace conflicts’. there will always be an elitist entity in charge of society, and there will always be a part of that elite who stamps all over the "little people" at the bottom. But while the cultural elite has rejected the label of woke, the values associated with being woke are more influential than ever.

It is easy to mock this as a bizarre attempt to bring political correctness to even the very youngest children but it is important to take seriously the fundamentally corrosive impact of woke ideology. These important values were problematised and rejected first; then proponents of woke ideology saw an opportunity and readily filled the moral vacuum. Woke activists see ‘colour-blindness’ and the original goals of the US Civil Rights movement as implicitly racist or aiding racism.In turn, young graduates carry this vocabulary and its associated ideas with them into the workplace. The Old English roots of ‘awake’ lie in both ‘arise’ and ‘revive’, and this has long led to metaphorical as well as literal usage.

What this means is a layer of well-educated middle class, ethnic minority professionals are assimilated into the cultural elite. It has introduced a climate of censorship and self-censorship and led to the cultivation of victimhood and dependency. The term ‘woke’ has been at the centre of many of the fiercest political and cultural debates over recent years. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Carville makes an important point about woke language but it is a mistake to assume that the problems with woke lie simply in its performance.

Yet to be woke is also to believe that demonstrating masculine behaviour makes someone a man (whatever their sex) while to be a woman is to look and act feminine. Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond novels, swoons over Bond star Daniel Craig for his portrayal of a spy who is less Lothario and more woke.

This has happened not off the strength of woke ideology alone, but because such institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles. Worse, it breathes new life back into racial thinking and emphasises differences between people that were only recently overcome.