What's Woker Than Woke?

The Clark paper examines the pace at which children integrate an understanding of '-er' endings, specifically as they refer to agent and instrument nouns. Language development has an interesting relationship with general human development: unlike something like height, it is dependent on both society and biology, both specific and universal. Our linguistic intuitions (a few kids in this study came up with "zibbing-man" or "zib-man" instead of "zibber") are often more important than the words we use, as any poet would tell you. For some set of aesthetic reasons we do not quite fully understand, we have certain non-codified linguistic intuitions, some function of word-sound, appearance on paper, relation to other words, and contexts in which it is heard. 

  The internet seems to be the primary driver of widely-accepted neologisms. I will focus on woke, meaning "uncommonly generally aware, specifically of the structure of society, often derisively". What are the factors that made woke thrive when countless other nascent neologisms died early? Perhaps one is clarity: it is both a) easy to tell when woke is used that it is not quite an old usage of the word, but b) easy to glean what is meant. But my guess is that the vague aforementioned aesthetic reasons play a part too. Could we, by teaching thousands of children fake neologisms and seeing what they prefer, predict how likely they are to be adopted by a society?

  I found it interesting and charming that children would intuit such false verbs as "to hamm" from hammer or "to trait" from traitor. Perhaps these words will enter our vernacular someday, but the underlying reasoning behind these false verbs is ultimately telling: we intuit structure, put our intuition to the test, and repeat, endlessly. To the extent that we can run a stack trace of the mind, our intuitive reasons behind why the words make sense don't seem to be able to tell the whole story. We can never be entirely conscious of what makes us prefer certain neologisms over others, but perhaps by systematically trying new ones we can identify what makes them resonate with us.

  For example, I find it interesting how weird the adjective woker looks, even though we have already established that woke is just another bit of our vocabulary. Perhaps when we see woke we do not enumerate the consequences of it's adjective-ness, namely the necessity of such words as woker and wokest. Also, it is worth pointing out that youth tend to catch on to neologisms faster than adults do, and the word woke has a particularly young feel to it.