I woke up this morning and, as soon as I awoke, having been awakened by the seagulls outside my window, which have woken me up every morning for the past seven years, I thought about the trendy new word woke. Then I started thinking about how we build adjectives out of verbs, which made me think about compound adjectives, and about past participles, and the way we sometimes pretend that nouns have them. Think of today’s article as a whirlwind tour of the adjective factory. We’ll start with woke, and I promise we’ll come back to it in the end…
Woke is an adjective, although – for reasons I’ll explain later - it might not look like one. It isn’t the opposite of asleep – that would be awake. Woke is one of those adjectives that describe a state at the end of a process, and the process is something like the one that the woman in this painting is experiencing: not actually waking from sleep, but becoming aware, or conscious, of something important.
But William Holman Hunt, who painted the picture in 1853, would never have referred to his subject as, say, “woke Wendy”, because in 1853 the adjective woke didn’t exist. It was coined by African American English speakers about a century later, and the important consciousness it refers to is awareness of the problems and struggles of disadvantaged groups in society (especially black people). Wendy is being awakened to something much more personal.
It’s very easy to invent new adjectives in English. When we want to, we can glue a whole phrase together to make a new adjective: You might say
He looked at me with a “What are you doing here?” expression on his face.
or
It was an I-wish-I-were-somewhere-else moment.
Multi-word (compound) adjectives like the ones underlined are fun to make, but they are limited: you can only use them in the pre-nominal or attributive position (before the noun they qualify), not in the predicative position - after, say, the verb be (I mean, The moment was I-wish-I-were-somewhere-else doesn’t really work) - and you can’t usually modify them with adverbs like very or totally.
By contrast, adjectives in which a phrase has been reduced to just two words can be much more flexible: a compound adjective like well-known is fully gradable (see my piece on beautiful for definitions), and works in all positions (She’s becoming extremely well-known).
There are lots of different ways of making two-word compound adjectives. Oh, look – there’s one! Let’s call it
Type 1:
A compound adjective of two words → A two-word compound adjective
The formula for Type 1 is: number + SINGULAR noun
a three-hour film; a 5-year plan; a ten-minute break
But most compound adjectives are made from verbs. Here are two of the most common patterns:
Type 2
This jam was made in someone’s home.
↓
It’s made-at-home jam.
↓
It’s home-made jam./ The jam is home-made.
Type 3
She works really hard.
↓
She’s a works-really-hard woman.
↓
She’s a really hard-working woman./
She is really hard-working.
Type 3 adjectives show us what our subject does, can do, did. In Type 3, the second part of the compound is a gerund – the form of a verb that ends –ing. The first part can be an adverb that qualifies the verb, as in the example, or it might be the object of that verb:
The YouTube video broke my heart. → It was a heart-breaking YouTube video.
These headphones cancel noise. → They are noise-cancelling headphones.
Type 2 compound adjectives show us the result of a process – in other words, what has been done to the subject: for example, the man who watched the video.
The man’s heart was broken. →The man was heart-broken.
The form of the verb here is the one we use in passive sentences: the past participle – the third form that you learn when you learn an irregular verb (see/saw/seen; take/took/taken).
If you think about it, this is how all the simple adjectives you know that end in -ed or –ing were born:
My work bores/tires/excites/surprises me. → It‘s boring/tiring/exciting/surprising work.
→ I quite often feel bored/tired/excited/surprised when I’m working.
The regular past participle ending -ed is so well-established as an adjective-forming tool (come back later to look at those two compound adjectives), that we sometimes stick it on the end of nouns when we’re making compound adjectives that describe an attribute of the thing or person we want to talk about. For instance, that poor man with a broken heart is not only heart-broken but broken-hearted ; A dog with three legs is a three-legged dog; and biologists and botanists love to classify animals as red-necked, great-crested, long-tailed and so on.
So the –ing gerund is the form of the verb that can make a process or action adjective – which is why the picture illustrating this article, of a young woman who is suddenly realizing that she is in a morally problematic situation, is entitled The Awakening Conscience. And the past participle is the verb form that, as an adjective, can describe a state at the end of a process. So, I hear you ask, why woke?
As suggested in the first paragraph of this article, the wake - waken - awaken family of verbs gives us four possible past participles to choose from - woken, awoken, wakened and awakened. Woke, like took, or saw, or threw, is a simple past tense. How did it get the job of adjective?
Well, woke comes from the non-standard variety of English that has sometimes been termed AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and, if you remember from my piece on Ain’t, non-standard English has different rules. One is that the past simple form of a three-form irregular verb can be used as a past participle. I’ve recently heard kids in my town using the adjective shook. While the standard English shaken might describe how you feel after seeing a violent crime or hearing some disturbing news, a little research has taught me that, in non-standard English, “I was shook” has quite a range of meanings, from “I was scared” to “I felt insulted” to “I was really surprised” to “I was impressed”.
No-one on BBC TV uses the adjective shook. Yet. The interesting thing about woke is that, from its non-standard origins (look it up on Wikipedia for an informative explanation of these), it has now invaded the mainstream of standard English. But it is dressed in the colours, and waves the flag, of non-standard English. So standard-English-speaking people who use the word woke are using it to show either that they think they are woke enough to understand the idea of wokeness, or – if they use it ironically, and this is much more likely - that they are sceptical about the idea of wokeness.
What the second kind of people are really saying is: if you usually speak standard English, but are prepared to use such a non-standard word unironically, you are trying too hard to show that you are aware of, and identify with, disadvantaged groups and their problems. Sometimes they are also suggesting that, being “ungrammatical”, the word, along with the idea it represents, is low in value, and not worthy of respect.
These people are probably forgetting about another adjective that they would use without a second thought: broke. We all know that the adjective broken is a standard past-participle adjective to describe the toy that you accidentally stepped on, or the heart of the sensitive chap who watched the tragic YouTube video. Broke is a completely different adjective, meaning “with no money”. If you’re absolutely penniless, you are flat bloke or stony broke. All of these expressions have been in use since the 19th Century, and broke is now a fully-fledged and freestanding (more lovely compounds!) adjective. It can now be used in all but the most formal standard English speech and writing, but its origins are, like woke, in non-standard English – not AAVE, but regional British vernacular English. As distrustful of non-standard English as the woke sceptics, the Oxford English Dictionary, even in 1989, still refused to give broke its own entry, listing it as a “slang” meaning of an “obsolescent form of broken”.
I have a feeling that language changes quicker these days, and that the passage from non-standard and slang to the realms of linguistic respectability is easier; so, 20 years from now, woke might be firmly established in our dictionaries. Then again, if it’s completely forgotten by 2025, I won’t be too shook...
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