I know I shouldn’t. but sometimes when I see someone that’s “different” I say something like, “gee, he’s a weird guy.” After I say something like that, I always think to myself that it sounds derogatory even though I don’t mean it that way. There used to be a man that attended our church that reminded me of Otis, the town drunk on the old Andy Griffith TV show. His hair was never combed, and he always wore a suit that looked like he’d slept in it. I always said, “there’s that weird guy Otis.” I wasn’t intentionally being “mean” but, in fact, I was. He was a really nice man and I had no reason to judge him as being weird.
So I got to thinking about that word weird. I looked it up in the dictionary and found a couple of definitions… one said it meant suggesting something supernatural or unearthly. The other defined it as very strange; bizarre.
When we use the word today, we’re usually referring to the second definition — “very strange.” I think maybe everyone is weird in their own way. Really, we think of a person as weird when they’re unconventional and not like everyone else. I’ve heard it said that no two people are exactly alike, so that means there are infinite possibilities of how anyone/everyone could be different.
Even though I usually use weird in a negative context, it doesn’t have to be — it can certainly be positive. For instance if you say someone is always so incredibly happy that it’s weird, or that someone knows so much about something that it’s weird, those would be positive uses of weird.
Say what you will, weird people are usually not dull and/or unoriginal… and probably what most people consider weird is usually unjustified.
During my extensive research of the word weird, I found that the word originally meant ‘having the power to control destiny’ — that would make it pretty cool to be weird. If the meaning hadn’t changed many years ago, I wonder what we’d call someone that’s unconventional or “different” today….
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