I know I shouldn\u2019t. but sometimes when I see someone that\u2019s \u201cdifferent\u201d I say something like, \u201cgee, he\u2019s a weird guy.\u201d After I say something like that, I always think to myself that it sounds derogatory even though I don\u2019t 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\u2019d slept in it. I always said, “there\u2019s that weird guy Otis.” I wasn\u2019t intentionally being \u201cmean\u201d but, in fact, I was. He was a really nice man and I had no reason to judge him as being weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I got to thinking about that word weird. I looked it up in the dictionary and found a couple of definitions\u2026 one said it meant suggesting something supernatural or unearthly. The other defined it as very strange; bizarre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we use the word today, we\u2019re usually referring to the second definition \u2014 \u201cvery strange.\u201d I think maybe everyone is weird in their own way. Really, we think of a person as weird when they\u2019re unconventional and not like everyone else. I\u2019ve heard it said that no two people are exactly alike, so that means there are infinite possibilities of how anyone\/everyone could be different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though I usually use weird in a negative context, it doesn\u2019t have to be \u2014 it can certainly be positive. For instance if you say someone is always so incredibly happy that it\u2019s weird, or that someone knows so much about something that it\u2019s weird, those would be positive uses of weird.
Say what you will, weird people are usually not dull and\/or unoriginal\u2026 and probably what most people consider weird is usually unjustified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During my extensive research of the word weird, I found that the word originally meant \u2018having the power to control destiny\u2019 \u2014 that would make it pretty cool to be weird. If the meaning hadn\u2019t changed many years ago, I wonder what we\u2019d call someone that\u2019s unconventional or \u201cdifferent\u201d today\u2026.
\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know I shouldn\u2019t. but sometimes when I see someone that\u2019s \u201cdifferent\u201d I say something like, \u201cgee, he\u2019s a weird guy.\u201d After I say something like that, I always think to myself that it sounds derogatory even though I don\u2019t … Continue reading