Weird word weird. It breaks the ‘i before e except after c’ rule for a start. And here’s a peculiar thing. Since the end of the Seventies, the word ‘weird’ has seen a tenfold increase in usage. This is weird indeed, since weirdness itself has been in steady decline.
You may think that’s a bold statement. How do you quantify weirdness? Well, the same way as I quantify anything. I make it up. But surely you can’t dispute this one. Let’s look at the evidence.
There have always been weird individuals throughout history – Napoleon, for example; he was a bit weird – but weirdness as a creative movement only began in 1951 with the Goon Show, which inspired three decades in which weird became the new normal. Monty Python, The Two Ronnies, Just A Minute, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, The Magic Roundabout, Rhubarb and Custard, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Sparks…
By comparison, life today seems rather square, doesn’t it. Where are the kids pulling weird faces into TV cameras? Where are the pop stars in wing collars and flares? Where are the game shows with foam giants bumping into each other? Where are the comb-overs? Where are the politicians with eyebrows like autumn hedgerows?
Could it be that the word ‘weird’ is bandied about so liberally these days that we all feel in danger of being branded with it? We see so much of ourselves, constantly staring in the digital mirror, and we’re a cutely aware when there’s even a hair out of place. So we’ve perfected our camera smiles, ditched our flamboyant threads, trimmed our eyebrows, shaved our heads and focused our evening’s viewing on ‘reality’, just to avoid offering ourselves up to the weird police – a fate worse than death.
Funnily enough, ‘weird’ originally meant ‘fate’, back in the olden days when it was weirdly spelt ‘wyrd’. If someone was wyrd it meant that they had the power to control fate. In fact, it could be used as a verb, not as in ‘weirded out’, but meaning to control someone’s fate. The three witches in Macbeth refer to themselves as ‘the weird sisters’, not because they listened to Jethro Tull and drank their own wee, but because of their ability to see the future.
This association with the supernatural helped to popularise the ‘otherworldly’ definition of ‘weird’, which morphed into meaning freakish and then softened to just mean odd.
After the war there was obviously a hunger for oddness, a gallows talent for ridicule that evolved into self-ridicule, later fuelled by the use of mind-bending drugs, and it produced some great entertainment – a proper laugh in the face of adversity. I miss it. The acceptance of ourselves as ridiculous is liberating, enlightening, inspiring and increasingly rare. But I feel it’s still in us, lying beneath the surface, waiting for its cue to spring out and start playing the flute.
