Weird is a word with good mileage
“Fair is foul and foul is fair"; wish we could all belong somewhere
Edit:
ate my words and captions. Edits incoming.It’s difficult to know how to determine the general valence of weird. It may belong to the bullying parlance of the 2000s—those which have now softened their edges to become personality quirks and affinity labels. (See my quick sorting check for 2000s terms below)1.
Basically, when I was at school, weird was an insult. By the time I graduated, weird was a self-identified badge of honour. Now, I don’t know what I think of the word, but it’s been surfacing as a cultural critique—interesting because it’s closer to the original meaning of the word? Looking at its origins, appearance is a theme, and so are power and control; maybe to be filed under shame, belonging, and “Othering”?
Weird is Cool and Cool is Weird
I’ve become accustomed to weird being something of a synonym for misunderstood, or marginalised, or self-confident. The valence is positive in contrast to childhood negative valence. See, but recently, I’ve heard the term ‘weird’ used negatively again, but not about a specific person.
At Kopano Ratele and Glenn Adams’s public lecture titled Toward a Decolonial Africa-centering Psychology, ‘weird’ surfaced as a way of describing colonial beliefs and tendencies. More specifically it was tied to epistemic exclusion and white normativity, which instead of being presented as bad and powerful forces, were instead called WEIRD.
I like the idea of a decolonial approach that is not militant, but observant. The dominant minority? It’s weird! Weird, as in: strange; it doesn’t belong; it doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t resonate; it makes me uncomfortable. I wonder if framing racism and coloniality as WEIRD is a way of not ascribing power to these ideas.2
White normativity and opulence have shaped not only the psychological profession but also popular culture, right? Even in my conscious lifetime, there’s been a zigzag of beauty standards and expectations of performance3, the consequences of not following these behavioural expectations vary, but often the underlying mechanism is exclusion and shame. i.e. act and look like the magazine says or face criticism.
What is weird is then that which should not belong, and though we’ve tried to reclaim it as simply being self-confident, maybe we should just stop trying to make ‘weird is actually cool’ the thing? Maybe weird should be a way of describing strange rules for culture?4 For example, peak hipster era when people wore fake glasses for the aesthetic. I think that was weird—a strange, bizarre trend, albeit relatively harmless.
The second example of ‘weird’ is more amusing but also negative in valence and a societal commentary, rather than directed at an individual.
What if we kissed under the Big Pants?
Selina Xu has a wonderfully crafted piece about China’s Ugliest Building Survey as displaying public dissatisfaction with the strange projects and architectural fantasy constructions that have filled the cityscapes over the last decade or so of hyper-growth. The term 'weird' surfaces not as a quirk, but something closer to other, or what is strange, alien, and doesn’t belong or fit within its surroundings.5
To be honest, when I first looked through the list, there were a number of buildings that struck me as cool, or futuristic, or modern. But, when I read this quote:
“Chongqing is a mountainous city, but this landmark doesn’t meld with the surrounding landscape, the towers jut out like nails,” said the 42-year-old marketing professional. “I reject it in my heart. A building stays for a long time — when it’s ugly, that impacts an entire local generation and our memory of the city.”
It made more sense. Because people live there, not just on holiday, but their whole lives. In Cape Town, the Hotel Sky with its awful red, glowing, erection, is something I reject in my heart. As someone who grew up on the other side of the bay and spent many nights on my parent’s roof watching the city silhouette cradled by the mountain, no one can convince me that this phallic, protruding, neon finial doesn’t ruin the view.
Is weird that which I reject in my heart?
For fun, I had a look, because I was interested in other types of weird, like the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, and at what point things become weird, like the Uncanny Valley.
The weirdest of the Weird Sisters
The origins of ‘weird’6 are magical and mystical! What feels fated is that weird has always had power dynamics embedded in the word—though the way this plays out changes over time…
Every etymology entry I’ve read ties ‘weird’ to the Weird Sisters or Witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Well, when we did Macbeth in high school, the teachers elected to show us the weirdest movie adaptation of Macbeth—yes, the 2006 Geoffrey Wright version where Sam Worthington has an orgy with the schoolgirl witches?7
There’s this interesting character analysis of the Weird Sisters / Witches that shows how even the way in which their lines are written8 helps the audience understand that these characters are ‘mysterious and other-worldly’. Here, weird is unearthly, malevolent, otherworldly, eerie, and bound up in a mysterious sense of fate.9 Weird also connotes the paradox of deceiving appearances:
“The Witches’ paradox – which indicates that appearances can be deceiving – is central to the play and reverberates through the major characters. Take Lady Macbeth, for example: ‘look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't’ (1.5.65–66).”
Honestly, the fact that so many of my examples and associations are visual, like music videos, feels like it illustrates the point that when I think of weird, I think of something looking weird. Like, it’s uncanny?
Uncannily Weird
Maybe weird is also something that is too close to familiar without actually being so? Or trying to emulate familiar? Or pretending to be? Trying to be something it’s not? It makes me think of the Scott Eberle paper on the Uncanny Valley of Play. As a comparison to the way that play has a porous boundary with what is not play, where surprise can momentarily become terror, Eberle discusses Mashihiro Mori’s Graph, where familiarity drops off into an alienation of the uncanny valley.10
"exposure and habituation to the strange and uncanny lessens its creepiness"11
Good: If weird is something that others and induces shame, or excludes people from belonging, then exposure can diminish this othering. Brene Brown, I think, has popularised the connection between shame and belonging—which weird is tied to as something that mediates between alienation and belonging. Weirdness could be a measure of how ‘other’ something is, which could be treated through habituation and exposure.
Good to know: If weird is creepy or bad, then knowing that exposure and habituation can lessen that creepiness helps to explain why certain standards for beauty or behaviour are so widely accepted. It’s a starting point to question why we might find certain weird practices or standards to feel very normal.
Okay, these are all the thoughts I have right now. The end.
These are in the footnotes, but I’m adding them here too for fun
Quick sorting check for 2000s terms
Loser: not as common, not as harsh of an insult, but also could be. Personally, I like the transformation of ‘being a loser’ into ‘take an L’.
For fun, read through the Urban Dictionary definitions of ‘Loser’. It’s like Yelp for people’s personalities. Feel free to add your own for whoever you can’t stand?
Nerd: used affectionately, or dismissively, (but less harshly after Big Bang Theory and Adam Driver-era Star Wars?) or to describe specialised skill and interest, can also be used as the verb ‘Nerd-ing’, which is just a good conversation???
(Loveable) Dork: Archetypal New Girl persona? Adam Driver in Llewyn Davis? Find yours based on your zodiac here!
Cool: cool is just a -core, surely, I believe cool as cool died with the Glee episode where those two wore sunglasses to be cool
Lame: haven’t heard this in a while, which is good because it’s kind of mean as well…
Weird: there’s been an insurgence of ‘embrace your weird’, or ‘be weird’ or ‘I’m a weirdo’ narrative—once it’s made its way to your local mass-produced store’s house decoration aisle, or someone has written a pop-psychology book, it’s over.
Weird Ecology, Weird Society
Perhaps in a similar way that Tim Morton advocates for a hazier approach to the climate crisis as a better way to address it, or ecology in general, maybe not? I guess the difference is that the lecture argues for Weird as a negative term and Morton argues for weird as ambiguous term where we relinquish our expectations and look for the strangeness, or make space for uncertainty, or accept that things will be different to our expectations.
In the lecture, it’s saying that our expectations are shaped by detrimental and malicious beliefs and that the beliefs and believing them are weird, whereas I think Morton’s standpoint is more neutral?
Here’s a sequence
2006 Paris Hilton Music video for Nothing in this World of Paris as a grown woman playing out the fantasies of a school kid with classic posters-on-bedroom-walls. The adult-child sexual interaction feels very weird to watch now.
I’m not going to link it, but there are similar dynamics in Taylor Swift’s 2008 You Belong With Me, where Taylor’s girl-next-door character does a lot of weird bedroom dancing and is in love with a cool guy who dates the cool gill. (FWIW I think it’s weird because it’s personal, vulnerable, and intimate and the weird part is the broadcast and I feel really strongly about privacy as a value? or it’s intending to be weird? weird as cool?)
Compare with the 2018 Doja Cat music video for MOOO!, which still capitalises on fantasy, but it aims to be funny rather than seductive and interpolates a generous amount of familiar cultural references. She sticks chips up her nose. Not weird? Cool because she can do what most of us would be weird for doing, but without being weird?
Contrast with 2023 Peach PRC song Perfect For You, which interpolates the Paris song. I believe it’s part of the story series that shows Peach leaving school and a bad family situation to make a life in big the world. It’s filled with queer, soft, whimsical overtones. Feels not weird, but many themes of alienation and longing. Just in time for the bimbofication of society, and discourse that offers a more nuanced approach to hyper-femininity not as a ‘cool mean girl’. (which wasn’t a problem in Clueless??? maybe)
“It is in this respect that games provide a compelling analogy to cultures. Both consist of more or less arbitrary goals and rules that allow people to become involved in a process and act with a minimum of doubts and distractions. The difference is mainly one of scale. Cultures are all-embracing: they specify how a person should be born, how she should grow up, marry, have children, and die.”
From Good Business by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I’m always going to quote this book, let’s be honest.
“The public backlash against such buildings has been so severe that even the government has stepped in, likely at the behest of President Xi Jinping, who personally called for an end to “weird buildings” at a literary symposium in 2014.”
Meaning and origins of the word: Weird
The first attestations of the word “weird” date back to 1400 but its original meaning was that of “having the power to control or influence the fate”. The word comes from the Old English substantive wyrd, which indicated the concept of “fortune” or “destiny”, but also the Fates, a group of goddesses capable of shaping the destiny of each human being.
As happened with several English idioms, it is due to Shakespeare that this word acquired a new meaning over time. In Macbeth, the three Fates of Norns are indeed indicated as “the weird sisters” and, since the latter were often portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, the term "weird" took on a new adjectival meaning, that of "odd-looking, uncanny".
(it wasn’t their look that was strange, it was the behaviour and scene choices that were bizarre—here’s a trailer to provide some context and some reviews [1, 2, 3] and a comparison of 3 different opening scenes). For a more academic take, here’s a paper.
MACBETH
So foul and fair a day I have not seen. (1.3.38)
FIRST WITCH
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid;
He shall live a man forbid (1.3.19–21)
A nice modern example with similar themes throughout could be Mona Lisa and The Blood Moon, where the main character is closer to the original definition of weird being in control or having power [over fate]. It’s also resplendent with themes of femininity, sexuality, wealth, magic, mental illness, and belonging. Fair review here.
Uncanny Valley
Having failed to discover the uncanny in his current emotional repertoire, Freud recalled how the feeling of the uncanny crept upon him as he became lost and disoriented in a misty forest. A similar feeling, he said, occurred when one was caught in a maze of interlocking alleys or when one groped around in a dark room only to circle and return to bump into the same furniture again. It was, in short, the feeling that came with being snared in helpless, disquieting repetition.
Note: is this a roast of Freud? I like how this is not only about the strange, but something close to power, that which should be recognisable, but is not.
Play hovers at this edge as we substitute a psychology of the normal for pathology. We look forward to jokes that disorient us and breach our expectations, for example. But they remain jokes by avoiding fear, shock, and unease and by framing the sense of uncertainty and immanence with positive emotions— anticipation, surprise, and the pleasure of a punch line.
This is how the Eberle piece ends. Now’s not the time, but I’m interested in the relationship between expectation, control, and predictability in interaction (like jokes, which have ambiguity), as it relates to safety, regulation, et cetera. Is this how memes and shitposting work?
When I find something weird it's because I'm not used to it. It sticks out like a sore thumb, much like "the Hotel Sky with its awful red, glowing, erection." I think people often stop here, and instantly label it as "bad" or the "other." It might be, it might not.
When weird is "bad" it's something I can't get used to (which isn't a lot of things). My heart never softens to it. Which you point out as "rejecting it in your heart."
When weird is "good" it's because I get used to it. If it continues to pop out of the background, there's something about it that I appreciate which helped me grow fond of it.
I liked the piece, hope to see more 😊