In the (unlikely) event that my grandchildren ever ask me for a capsule summary of the culture wars of the late 2010s and early 2020s, I may simply direct them to two viral clips, both starring women who’d been asked to define a contentious word.

The first instance occurred a year ago, during the second day of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s US Supreme Court confirmation hearings. “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” asked a Republican senator. “No, I can’t,” responded the judge, before adding, infamously, “I’m not a biologist.”

Earlier this month, it was a conservative’s turn for embarrassment, when pundit and book author Bethany Mandel was asked to define the word “woke” while appearing on a YouTube show produced by The Hill. Mandel, a mother of six who later reported enduring a kind of on-air panic attack, was left speechless. This produced a particularly embarrassing spectacle given that Mandel’s latest book is basically one big takedown of wokeness. On the very first page of its introduction, in fact, Mandel and co-author Karol Markowicz wrote, “We named this book Stolen Youth, but we could have just as easily called it Woke War on Families.”