weird | wird | adjective suggesting something supernatural; uncanny: the weird crying of a seal.
• informal very strange; bizarre: a weird coincidence | all sorts of weird and wonderful characters.
• archaic connected with fate.
“Weird” is an irritating thing to be called. It implies the existence of normal, of something conventional. But when you get to thinking about things deemed normal or conventional—like a late twenty-something who wears a navy Patagonia vest, toothily smiles all the time and looks for his Mrs. with whom he can make two nice babies in the burbs—you realize that it all seems really quite weird, like a child who quietly holds M&Ms between the palms of his hands to soften them up before eating and wouldn’t do it any other way. Then you are running in circles, and it is certainly weird to be running in circles: is it weird to be normal or normal to be weird?
THE WORD
At some point in the eighth or ninth century BCE, an Anglo-Saxon poet evoked the passage of time:
“Well-wrought this wall: Wyrd broke it.
The stronghold burst…
Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,
The work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth…
Shattered the showershields, roofs ruined,
Age under-ate them.
And the wielders and wrights?
Earthgrip holds them—gone, long gone,
Fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers
And sons have passed.”
The poem is “The Ruin,” the poet is anonymous. Some of the original—it comes down to us though the Exeter Book—is even burned and so it is therefore incomplete. The author was describing the monumental structures built by the Romans during their four century (43-410 BCE) occupation of Britain. Evidently, Roman architecture gobsmacked the Anglo-Saxons, who had neither the technological nor logistical wherewithal to build these big things for themselves.
One aspect striking the modern reader is the author’s use of the word “Wyrd.” To these people—speakers of Old English, the Germanic forerunner of our mother tongue, which held sway in the land in the centuries between the Roman and Norman overlords (c. 410-1066)—wyrd was a noun.
It had a meaning more closely aligned to how the Latin-speaking Romans thought of Fate: those forces that drive life and the universe forward, for better or worse, combining human destiny with the unceasing progress of time. The Oxford English Dictionary is more succinct on the matter: “The principle, power or agency by which events are predetermined.” The word had originally come from the Old English verb weorthan, which means “to become.” So, a happening driven by the forces of wyrd was literally in the process of becoming.
But “weird” changed over the years, evolving from this primary “fate” idea to its secondary meaning, which is how we today use it (i.e., supernatural, strange and uncanny). The primary usage had been all over Old English, but then it died down for several centuries only to return, with the new meaning, around 1300.
What happened?
History had intervened. William the Conqueror came over from Normandy in 1066, his army vanquishing that of the Anglo-Saxons at Hastings before embarking on a violent pacifying mission over his new realm.
You don’t like us? they said. Fuck you, you’re hanged from this tree.
In the process, Norman French would become the language of literature and aristocracy for the next two centuries. English existed in the shadows, still spoken among the hoi polloi but not as often written down. It evolved in the streets. And it was peppered with so many French words that, to this day, people will incorrectly regard it as a Romance language, not Germanic. And when the French tide at last receded around 1300, it was an altered language: no longer Old, but Middle, and even approaching Modern.
“Weird” transformed during these benighted centuries spent in the linguistic underground. It went up to fabled, impoverished Scotland and developed its bizarre spelling, in which the “e” comes before the “i,” and, in so doing, it does not follow English spelling’s famous “’i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ rule.
Putting the “e” before the “i” was, in fact, a Scottish spelling convention. The Scots, with their Gaelic tongue and proud culture, appreciated neither the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons nor the Normans. They had their own thing going on and developed their own spelling conventions as a result.
The evolution of the word reached its late stage with Shakespeare, who solidified this new spelling and combined it with its contemporary meaning in his Scottish play, Macbeth.
One of the 1606 play’s running motifs are the Weird Sisters, three clairvoyants who stand above a boiling cauldron putting all sorts of things in motion. The Weird Sisters—who are already figments of Scottish mythology—are heavily associated with the Fates and with the older meaning of the word. But what Shakespeare and this coven wrought was an association of the word with the uncanny, supernatural and strange.