Unwoke Bloke in Depths of Dorset

I’m a late adopter of linguistic novelties and neologisms. Is that a humblebrag? A self put-down?

I’ve only just seen - or consciously registered - the word “humblebrag” in print, in an article by Libby Purves about Prince Andrew, in yesterday’s The Times newspaper (“a humblebrag about being too honourable”). A good word, I thought, totally unaware of Harris Wittels’ book Humblebrag, The Art of False Modesty (2012).

Living down in Dorset, in William Barnes country, I tend to prefer the old dialect words. OK, I’m well behind the times.

Writing a blog, these days, may be a symptom of chronic humblebragging. Could I have unwittingly become a practitioner of false modesty, of self-deprecating name-dropping?

Just say I’m not fully “woke”, in terms of current slang and trendy terms.

At the recent Corfu Literary Festival, I asked Tom Holland, one of the speakers, what exactly he meant by the word “woke”, which he had been using in his talk. I wanted him to define it for the benefit of Greek members of the audience who might have been unfamiliar with the word and all its associations.

It didn’t prove that easy for him to provide a neat, succinct definition.

I will definitely adopt the word humblebrag. I'll leave 'woke' to those who are more woke than me.

A lot of people who are not woke are also prone to humblebrags, it seems, whatever their rank or class.

For more examples and definitions, read this book: