The Hidden Grammatical Reason That ‘Weird’ Works

When Gov. Tim Walz called Donald Trump and his worldview “weird,” it got immediate attention, launched a thousand memes and may very well have helped him land the job as Kamala Harris’s running mate. Michelle Obama’s dictum that “when they go low, we go high” is admirable, but there’s a lot to be said for the occasional step or two down the ladder. To many observers, “weird” immediately seemed right, a fresh approach to the mix of childish cattiness and outright menace coming from opponents of Walz and Harris. But the reasons for its success as an epithet aren’t as obvious. They come from deep in the word’s history, and in the ultimate purpose to which we put language.

In Old English the word meant, believe it or not, “what the future holds,” as in what we now refer to as fate. The sisters in “Macbeth” were the “weird sisters,” in the meaning of “fate sisters,” telling the future. But they were also portrayed as ghoulish in appearance and attire. With the prominence of this play and similar fate-sister figures in other ones, the sense set in that “weird” meant frighteningly odd.

In the 20th century, the word lost its hint of the macabre as its meaning became something quieter. “Weird” now means peculiar — perhaps passingly so, but against what one would expect.

In this sense, “weird” has settled into a realm of the language that isn’t taught as grammar in our schools but should be. Verbal communication is not only about whether something is in the past or the future, or whether it is singular or plural. It’s also about what is novel. We tend to seek people’s attention to tell them something they don’t yet know.

Imagine someone new to the English language asking you what the “even” in “He even had a horse” means. It would be hard, because school doesn’t teach us about the role that identifying novelty plays in how we form sentences. “He even had a horse” implies that someone’s possession of a horse, as opposed to just a big backyard, a fence and some dogs, is unexpected. All languages have ways of doing this. In Saramaccan, a language I have studied that was created by Africans who escaped slavery in Suriname, a little word, “noo” — pronounced “naw” — shows that something is news. “Noo mi o haika i” means not just “I will call you” but also “So, OK then, I will call you.”

Applying “weird” to MAGA is a great debate team tactic, a deceptively complex rhetorical trick that uses the simplest of language to make a sophisticated point: that the beliefs that MAGA is supposed to be getting us back to defy expectation, usually for the simple reason that they’re false.