Theodore Dalyrymple nails the woke:
One of the most astonishing things about the woke is their high boredom threshold. They seem to have the same thoughts about the same subjects, expressed in the same language, all their waking lives. They never tire or let their vigilance down. They look at Raphael or Botticelli and see only social injustice. They are terrible bores.
The explanation of their persistence, which resembles that of flies on a corpse, is that truth, which holds no interest for them, is not their object, but power, the cynosure of every ambitious mediocrity’s eyes.
It occurred to me recently that I had a box seat for one of wokeism’s earliest performances: the replacement of “Christmas Party” by “Holiday Party”.
The company where I was a senior manager had laid on an annual Christmas Party for many years. One quipster characterized the refreshments as a box of Ritz crackers, a slab of Velveeta, and jug of cheap, red wine. It wasn’t that bad, but certainly toward that end of the cheap-lavish scale.
Somehow or other a party committee was established, and the parties grew more lavish: fully catered affairs with roast beef, various luscious tidbits spanning hors d’oeuvres to dessert, and a full (free) bar that included a palatable sparkling wine. At the same time, however, the party began to be billed as the Holiday Party.
The culprit, behind the scenes, was the Human Resources Department — which I had grudgingly allowed to be re-christened after decades of existence as the Personnel Department. Well, the real culprit wasn’t a department, which is an insentient abstraction, but the ladies women females cis-females of the department who attended to such matters in the interest of employee morale (or for the sake of their inner bossiness).
Our company was far from the only one to be complicit in the politically correct adoption of euphemistic language, lest anyone by offended. But it was certainly one of the horde of unwitting abettors of the advancement of wokeism at the expense of inoffensive and binding tradition. (Perhaps that’s why it was easy for me to put the kibosh on the Holiday Party several years after it became known as such, during a budget squeeze.)
Our Christmas Parties, before they had been renamed, were gladly attended by atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians of various sects, and who knows what else. That the parties became better attended after their renaming had everything to do with their increasing lavishness and nothing to do with what they were called. There had not been, in our company, a complaint about the use of “Christmas Party”. It was just that someone in HR had picked up on a trend that had begun somewhere else — probably in California, at the instigation of an exceptionally sensitive cis-female.
The substitution of “Holiday Party” for “Christmas Party” may seem like an inconsequential matter, but it was not. It was the proverbial camel’s nose. And now, because too many persons (like me) who were in a position to fight political correctness but did not, Americans are living a linguistic nightmare: The use of the wrong word in the wrong place at the wrong time can mean the loss of a job, social ridicule and censure, and financial devastation.
Mea culpa.
See also, “Writing: A Guide — Part IV” (scroll to B.5)