GARNET RIDGE, Ind. — A Garnet Ridge couple who say they have spent six years opposing the word “woke” looked it up for the first time Wednesday evening and learned that it refers to being awake, a discovery that left them, by their own account, “in a very confusing position, because we are against it, and we are it.”
Wade Hollenbeck, 58, a retired tool-and-die supervisor, and his wife, Tammy, 56, a school-bus dispatcher, searched for the definition at 7:14 p.m. at their kitchen table after a neighbor asked them what they meant by the word, which both have used, by their own estimate, “about 40 times a day” since 2020.
According to Merriam-Webster, the first definition of “woke” is “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues.” Wade read the entry aloud, then read it a second time more slowly, and then asked his wife whether the dictionary had been changed.
“It says ‘aware.’ It says ‘actively attentive.’ That’s us,” said Wade, who stopped reading the definition at that point. “We’ve been awake this entire time. We have been telling people to wake up for six years.”
“We have been awake this entire time. We have been telling people to wake up for six years,” Tammy said, confirming her husband’s statement, which she said she had been about to make.
The couple said they have told an estimated 4,100 people to “wake up,” including relatives, a pharmacist, a man at a hardware store, and, on one occasion, a crowd at a minor league baseball game, in addition to posting the phrase on social media 2,212 times. Tammy said they have also placed a “WAKE UP” sticker on four vehicles and a mailbox, which Wade said he checks “every morning, to stay alert.”
Asked whether being against a word that means alert was consistent with telling everyone to be alert, Wade said it was “the opposite, in a way that’s the same.” Asked to explain, he said that the word had been taken from its proper owners, who he identified as “people like us who are awake,” and that being against it was a way of getting it back by not saying it, except to refer to it, which they would continue to do.
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said the Center has tracked how often Americans oppose words they have not looked up. “Among people who strongly oppose a word, 91.3 percent have not opened a dictionary in the previous five years, and 100.0 percent of the remainder opened it to confirm they were right,” Teller said. “In the Hollenbecks’ case, the dictionary has now been consulted, which the Center regards as an unusual and possibly irreversible development. Further study is needed.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the situation was easy to resolve. “You can’t be against something you are. It’s just common sense,” Brickhouse said by phone from a hardware store. “So it follows that the word is wrong, the dictionary is wrong, and they are not it, even though it is them. That’s what common sense is for.”
After 19 minutes, the Hollenbecks concluded that the dictionary had been “compromised,” and Wade drafted a strongly worded letter to it. The letter, which the Reporter reviewed, asks the dictionary to “stop being so aware” and demands that it publish a correction defining the word as “something other people are.”
Tammy said she did not think they should stay up late about it. Wade said he was “wide awake,” and that he would stay up as long as it took.