Have you ever thought about what a word that you use possibly every day really means? One of my professors brought this idea up to the class today as we were discussing Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. The passage we were reading said "The over-arching trees stretched their leafless brances abouve his head, bare and weird in the dusky light." Weird. What does weird mean? I asked some of my friends this after class and they could only describe the word as "weird is just weird."
He gave us a condensed history lesson on the word, which stems from the Old English wyrd meaning fate. The word started to change when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth's Weird Sisters. Now, I've never read Macbeth, but I learned the whole "double, double, toil and trouble/ fire burn and cauldron bubble" from watching Mary Kate & Ashley when I was little and watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, so I've heard of the witches. What I learned about the Weird Sisters today is that they are seers and they can see fate.
Our professor skipped over a pretty long period of time then and just asked my class what we think weird means now. We started with the thought that weird is a person that is non-conforming to societies standards. But weird does not just apply to people. It can also apply to sounds, hair, behavior, etc. Finally we settled on the idea that weird is something that is slightly different. Weird was in the back of my mind all day. I kept trying to come up with my own meaning for it, but I really couldn’t think of the right thing. So looking it up in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and finding that it just means “unusual or strange” really made me feel weird.
Even though the idea of
a word not meaning what I thought it meant stayed in my head all day, I really
love the classes that make me think. I especially love that such a weird
conversation came from such a singular line in a 447 page novel. And now, for
the next week, I’m going to think about the word weird every single time I say
it. What can I say, college is great.
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