I remember that term used straight, without dismissal and only a hint of irony, in 1984. A white college friend, very much of the left, used it with a quiet sprinkle of irony, but sincerely. (“Of course, you know this if you’re” — smile and two-millisecond pause, signaling “you know” — “politically correct.”) He meant that a certain complex of leftist beliefs — i.e., the ones called “woke” in 2012 — were obviously the proper ones for any reasonable person to have, that they signaled a higher awareness.

In a view like that, there is, inevitably, a certain self-satisfaction. And in some of those holding this kind of view, that self-satisfaction will express itself in dismissal and abuse of those ungifted with the third eye in question. The result will be resistance, much of it no less pretty, and this was why, just a few years after my college friend used the term, “politically correct” had become the slur “P.C.,” hurled at the left from the right and even from the center.

“Woke” has just undergone the same process: Those bristling at being accused of not being woke have pushed back to the point of leaving the term in bad odor. Certainly “woke” has a racial substrate, but the larger process here is the race-neutral euphemism treadmill, a term I am ripping off from Steven Pinker. A well-used word or expression is subject to ridicule or has grimy associations. A new term is born to replace it and help push thought ahead. But after that term spends some time getting knocked around in the real world, the associations the old term had settle back down, like gnats, on the new one. Yet another term is needed. Repeat.