Back in the 1990s, the proto-Woke, such as Nobel literature laureate Toni Morrison, had this habit of injecting hyphens and parentheses into words, especially gerunds (which were the glamour part of speech in the 1990s, kind of like pronouns are today), as a sort of secret handshake to signify (a major 1990s word) that they had studied French literary theory of the Foucault and Derrida varietals.
We didn’t have the word back then, but this anthology edited by Morrison must have the cringiest title of any book since Gutenberg.
Time magazine gave Morrison a column for awhile back then, but she was one of the worst nonfiction writers I’ve ever read. So I was surprised when I finally read one of her novels (Song of Solomon) and it was fine.
