I really tried to ignore it and let it go as just another passing trend. It’s not my language, not my culture and not my battleground, but it’s hard. It hurt me seeing it slowly spreading and getting bigger. What made me decide to vent was reading someone talk about their struggles and seeing a familiar sentence that might be familiar to all: “I was a weird child”.
Being weird is not usually a problem, the issue usually is people being incapable to accept what they consider weird. Different is not wrong, queer is not wrong, expressing yourself and living the only way you know when it’s not hurting anyone around you is definitely not wrong, even if it doesn’t conform with society.
All these horrible people hate being called weird because it’s what they having been calling us the whole time, but in more specific ways. I feel using it as a slur now just reinforces the negative connotations and validate their view.
Update: semantic satiation to the rescue. Weird became a meme and a trend everyone wanted to take part and use regardless of it making sense.
I think this is similar to another thread discussing words used to attack people based on them being different than the “norm” in some way, and I think it really merits a discussion around language as a weapon in general. Any word that is used as a weapon will almost by definition be a word that “otherizes”. Even when you are attacking someone for being part of the “normal” populace (which does exist as an insult, e.g. “normies”, “npc”, etc), you are inherently implying that you are not that, and thus the person is different than you. And to be clear, it is important to be able to otherize bad groups and ideas.
I’ve heard the suggestion that no insults should be necessary to attack e.g. Rightwing fascists, and that simply labeling them what they are should be enough of a turn-off to the average person, but imo this ignores the reality of language. ‘Fascist’ is in reality just a political label, akin to ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, ‘conservative’, etc. Using a label as an attack will fall flat if the person you’re attacking does not object to the label, or if the persons viewing the attack as a third party do not attach the same negative emotions to the word that you do (which sadly but, if you know US history, very predictably, is the case here). Also, you run the very real danger (which has already been happening in US politics as well) of making observers dismiss the criticism entirely as hyperbole, e.g. “Dems just call anyone they disagree with Nazis”, based on the label not fitting perfectly.
So if stating a technical description/ label alone is not enough to derail dangerous Right-wingers, we’re left needing weapons, and weapons have to cause damage to be useful, and damage for words comes from their emotional impact.
I think there are classes of words whose use is fundamentally incompatible with Left-oriented philosophies, such as any insult based on an intrinsic characteristic (i.e. slurs), but I don’t think that “weird” qualifies as this, since it is determined entirely by being different than whatever the ‘norm’ in an area is, and what is weird can change based on time, location, person, family, etc.
There is a difference between saying that weird is bad, period (i.e. insisting on conformity with the norm), and saying that a particular form of weirdness is bad.
I think we need to be comfortable otherizing dangerous groups and philosophies, and not treating them as though they deserve respectful engagement as just another acceptable form of philosophy to engage with. If ‘weird’ were less malleable, I could see the argument against using it to otherize, but even in my short lifespan what is considered ‘weird’ has drastically changed over time and based on location. I don’t think that calling Trump and Vance ‘weird’ is making anyone think, “yeah, non-conformity is actually bad”.
Sorry for rambling.
It’s not rambling, we need this extreme detail of clarification specifically because of this increased push of arbitrary words into slur territory (not IMO, but that’s where the outrage is coming from.)
In addition to that, we have such a high overlap of meanings that when this push does occur, it’s done so to remove other meanings from the word.
Weird used to be a wide combination of things. Now it’s being attempted to be turned into an insult in a way that it wasn’t quite an insult before.
Basically, the inflection of language has slowly been dying as critical thinking and literacy skills have dropped. You used to be able to call someone weird and based on your inflection, people understood the context.
Inflection from context isn’t reliable anymore, because if someone wants it to mean something else, that’s what it will mean to them. (And less pointed, sometimes people don’t realize words can mean different things. But this doesn’t happen as often)