Quiz: How many times did Republicans say ‘woke’ at their last debate?

If you watched last week’s Republican presidential debate, you heard a lot of nonsense.

But shockingly, there’s one word you didn’t hear: woke.

Woke had a precipitous decline in usage over the summer. Google searches for the word have tanked. For years, woke was firmly lodged among Merriam-Webster’s most-searched terms, and yet in the last few months, the word has frequently not appeared on that list at all. In August’s first Republican debate, the word came up only once, from Nikki Haley. In the second debate a month later, zero times.

After spending the last few years coopting, redefining, and villainizing all things woke, Republicans have … given up on it?

But I thought it was ever so important.

Dictionary and Google lookups are one thing, but an analysis of news websites surfaces similar results. The NOW Corpus tracks 18 billion words that have appeared in web-based newspapers and magazines since 2010. It shows the usage of woke fell off a cliff this summer. The word came up less than half as often in September as it did in March of this year.

It’s quite a turnabout for a word that was looking to be the centerpiece of a number of campaigns, especially that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Less than two years ago, DeSantis was so bent on branding himself the ultimate anti-woke crusader that he announced a legislative proposal called the Stop WOKE Act, which aimed to end teaching about race and discrimination. He frequently positioned himself amid boldfaced signs advertising his “war on woke.”

Now, after months of regularly hammering the word, neither of his X (formerly — and come on, effectively still — Twitter) accounts has mentioned woke since July 21.

We’ve seen this before. Remember 2020, when Republicans couldn’t stop using the word acuity? Its usage surged as soon as Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary that year, and remained high while Biden, who was largely campaigning from home amid COVID-19, was defined by his opposition as senile — lacking “mental acuity.”

Then came Sept. 29, 2020 — the first debate between Biden and Donald Trump. It was many voters’ first chance to hear from Biden himself, and when he performed just fine and didn’t appear onstage as a drooling vegetable, it neutered the acuity storyline. Usage of the word plummeted the next day and remained low.

We don’t yet know why Republicans have suddenly lost all interest in the word woke, but DeSantis’ poll numbers might provide a hint. When, this past May, DeSantis first published his 899-word announcement that he was running for president, five of those words were woke (including two in one sentence). At the time, polls rated him as 31% favorable, 35% unfavorable. Just four months later, his favorables are up to 34%, while unfavorables have shot up to 48%.

Have Republicans realized the “war on woke” wasn’t netting them any real gains, and so they abandoned it? Did they decide to get woke themselves?

Tough to say, but now that they’ve finally eased up on abusing woke, it feels like I can finally get a little sleep.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and subjunctives to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.