Former president and Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance have been called worse: Fascists, Nazis, Misogynists, racists, to name a few. Trump has regularly been labeled a narcissist, a megalomaniac, a rapist, and many expletives. Yet both candidates, along with much of the MAGA crowd, just shrugged them off. But when Minnesota governor Tim Walz said, “These are weird people on the other side,” on MSNBC last month, Republicans took umbrage.
“Weird” began as a noun, not an adjective, and meant fate. It’s a direct descendant of the Old English weorðan and a cognate of the German “werden,” both meaning "to become."
The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the word’s change in
meaning, from a noun to an adjective, and from the eerie world of the fates to
the strange and curious:
“The sense of ‘uncanny, supernatural’ developed from Middle English use of
weird sisters for the three Fates or Norns (in Germanic mythology), the
goddesses who controlled human destiny. They were portrayed as odd or
frightening in appearance, as in "Macbeth" (and especially in 18th
and 19th century productions of it), which led to the adjectival meaning
"odd-looking, uncanny" (1815); ‘odd, strange, disturbingly different’
(1820)”
Since the 19th century and especially since the 1960s, “weird” has become an even milder adjective, usually meaning odd or eccentric. In 1960s counterculture, a weird experience was usually a good one. Heck, Al Yankovic made it his trademark.
Then what is it about being called “weird” that so upsets the MAGA folks? All I can surmise is that they see themselves as the American norm, and to be labeled as deviating from that norm is a shock.
I’ve never been offended at being called weird. But then, I’ve never been offended at being called a liberal.
Image: The norns Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld beneath the world
tree Yggdrasil (1882) by Ludwig Burger.
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