Has the word ‘woke’ become a lazy, all-too-common cliché? The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver thinks so. During an appearance at the Hay Festival, she has lamented how the word has become ‘horribly overused’. The author says: ‘I’m as tired of it as you are. There have been other people trying to coin something else, which we’d also get tired of, but they usually have more than one syllable so they don’t catch on.