“Weird” is a weird word | Hacker News Reader

“Weird” is a weird word

deadlanguagesociety.com

91 pointspseudolus33 comments

Gives Terry Pratchett's "Wyrd Sisters" a whole new layer of meaning. The man knew his language history, apparently.

Also interesting you can see the influences of Old English on German as well:

> Wyrd comes from the same root as the verb weorþan, pronounced roughly WEAR-than, which meant ‘to happen’ or ‘become’.

"werden" is literally "to become" in modern German. The connection to "wyrd" is a bit more tenuous, but "wird" does also mean "will (be)", so there might be some common root here.

That was a major theme of "Wyrd Sisters". The book itself was a parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth, which featured three "weird sisters" (actually "weyard sisters" and even "weyward sisters".)

As the OP article points out, Shakespeare based his sisters on the Fates of mythology - goddesses of destiny - known as "wyrd sisters". Pratchett was obviously aware of that connection, since the battle between fate and human choice is a core theme of the book.

Good article about this: https://magichumanism.substack.com/p/discworld-reread-5-wyrd...

Thanks for the link!

All true - but if I understand the OP's article right, the whole emergence of the modern word "weird" came because in Shakespeare's time, the original root "wyrd" and meaning "fate" of the word were basically lost to history for most people. So contemporaries made up a new meaning "odd" when the word again got more popular through the play.

Pratchett hints at this by straight-up using the old spelling, that not even in the original Shakespeare play was used - and then of course plays with both meanings, as the witches are both deeply involved with fate, but also just strange in the modern sense.

Disclaimer though: Didn't read either Macbeth nor this Discworld book so far, soo ... this is just idle speculation.

https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/wyrd-sisters.html

The increase in usage in the latter half of the 20th century is interesting to me, because I recall being surprised in elementary school that "weird" was a dictionary word. I thought it was informal slang among kids, having associated its usage not with adults but with those my age, who generally found its sound amusing.

Where did you go to school and was English your first language?

In America in the 70s, and yes.

The word for a word that describes itself is autological

Is the word "nonautological" autological ?

In an otherwise idle moment some time ago, I for some reason started pondering what we really meant when we said/wrote something was "weird", as it seemed an odd word and not really as defined as it seemed.

The closest solution I came up with was "weird" is used to describe something we really don't quite understand, don't "get", or "doesn't compute".

Since then, I've found it fits quite well in most situations and haven't found any better explanation. Even seems not misaligned with this article. Anyone else have better thoughts?

"Evokes curiosity" places it into a nicely subjective place, and covers things which are both disturbly weird and charmingly amusingly weird.

However it doesn't quite cover the "weird" that is used dismissively, to suggest something is not worth trying to understand.

Approaching it from an (un)explainable or (un)computable perspective gets "weird" when we talk about coincidences where we don't really know what the actual odds are. For example, there relative positions and masses of the Sun, Moon, and Earth are not too weird compared to the weird apparently-pure coincidence that we see both Sun and Moon at almost the same apparent size, leading to an observable phenomenon unique in the solar system.

I like your interpretation because it evokes further processing for some situation or whatever is that one is assigning “weird” to. So not uncomputable but may require more compute.

Ah, yes, improvements both — the awesomeness of internet strangers!

"Evokes Curiosity" and "Does not yet compute" seem much better and more useful.

Weirdly, the word seems to have mostly maintained its meaning through these strange bottlenecks. Something that is weird is something that inexplicably is; something that has to be dealt with even if not understood.

We don't yet know surely the path by which we will meet our fates, but nevertheless we will meet them.

Engl. "weird" (happen, to become) ~ German "werden" (will [be]).

Regarding irregularity of the English language, there's the well-known urban poem:

  Dearest creature in creation,
  Study English pronunciation.
  I will teach you in my verse
  Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
  I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
  Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
  Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
  So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

  Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
  Dies and diet, lord and word,
  Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
  (Mind the latter, how it's written.)
  Now I surely will not plague you
  With such words as plaque and ague.
  But be careful how you speak:
  Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
  Cloven, oven, how and low,
  Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

  Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
  Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
  Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
  Exiles, similes, and reviles;
  Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
  Solar, mica, war and far;
  One, anemone, Balmoral,
  Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
  Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
  Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

  Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
  Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
  Blood and flood are not like food,
  Nor is mould like should and would.
  Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
  Toward, to forward, to reward.
  And your pronunciation's OK
  When you correctly say croquet,
  Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
  Friend and fiend, alive and live.

  Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
  And enamour rhymes with hammer.
  River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
  Doll and roll and some and home.
  Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
  Neither does devour with clangour.
  Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
  Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
  Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
  And then singer, ginger, linger,
  Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
  Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

  Query does not rhyme with very,
  Nor does fury sound like bury.
  Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
  Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
  Though the differences seem little,
  We say actual but victual.
  Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
  Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
  Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
  Dull, bull, and George ate late.
  Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
  Science, conscience, scientific.

  Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
  Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
  We say hallowed, but allowed,
  People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
  Mark the differences, moreover,
  Between mover, cover, clover;
  Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
  Chalice, but police and lice;
  Camel, constable, unstable,
  Principle, disciple, label.

  Petal, panel, and canal,
  Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
  Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
  Senator, spectator, mayor.
  Tour, but our and succour, four.
  Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
  Sea, idea, Korea, area,
  Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
  Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
  Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

  Compare alien with Italian,
  Dandelion and battalion.
  Sally with ally, yea, ye,
  Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
  Say aver, but ever, fever,
  Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
  Heron, granary, canary.
  Crevice and device and aerie.

  Face, but preface, not efface.
  Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
  Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
  Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
  Ear, but earn and wear and tear
  Do not rhyme with here but ere.
  Seven is right, but so is even,
  Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
  Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
  Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

  Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
  Is a paling stout and spikey?
  Won't it make you lose your wits,
  Writing groats and saying grits?
  It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
  Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
  Islington and Isle of Wight,
  Housewife, verdict and indict.

  Finally, which rhymes with enough?
  Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
  Hiccough has the sound of cup.
  My advice is give it up!

i before e except after c

or when sounded as 'a' as in neighbor or weigh

or just because fuck you, it's English

https://www.espressoenglish.net/i-before-e-except-after-c-ru...

At least we don’t gender our nouns!

Learning German, I could not memorize correct usage of der/die/das for the life of me

Best to learn these things the way babies do -- by listening to the speech of others and copying it, and letting a native correct you. Eventually the correct conjugations will feel natural.

In Spanish, native speakers typically learn (implicitly) or memorize (explicitly) the gendered article along with the noun, so instead of thinking "hmm, let me remember the gender of mapa" they'll just have that noun stored internally as "el mapa". It's still a matter of memorization (at least for words whose gender violates the typically spelling heuristics), but it's not really conceived of as memorizing the word and then separately memorizing its gender. And of course, there will always be rare or specialized terms that a native speaker might recognize but confidently know the gender. This is especially true for the small set of nouns whose gender varies by region or context.

Except in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.

In French, it's common for people not to remember the gender of uncommon words. IIRC, there is or was a radio program in France that would call up random people and offer them a prize if they could guess the genders of a list of 10 words correctly.

> in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.

Isn't that 99.9% referring to the reliability of spelling heuristics for the words that match a heuristic? For example, the -o and -a spelling heuristic reliably indicates gender something like 99+% of the time, but only about two thirds of Spanish nouns end in -o or -a. There are a few other suffixes with string gender indication, but even then I think you can only account for like 75% of Spanish nouns.

I'm strenuously disagreeing with the 75%, especially in terms of usage. Almost all nouns that end in -a (unless they're Greek neuters), -ión, -umbre, or -dad are feminine. Otherwise, they're masculine.

There are plenty of exceptions, but 1/1000 words sounds about right to me.

edit: my point was that French is far more chaotic than that, and it does cause mistakes. Goes with the general observation that French is easy enough to read, but hard to write.

> I'm strenuously disagreeing with the 75%, especially in terms of usage.

Oh for sure. I wasn't weighting by usage.

You remind me that France had (maybe still does?) national dictation competitions (championnat national de dictées). Much of French orthography is silent, so can be a real challenge!

There's a movie "Weird Science" which i always appreciated if only for breaking the rule twice in two words.

i before e except after c or when sounded like a as in neighbor or weigh.

But there are exceptions. English language orthography is a weird science.

my third grade teacher taught us:

>i before e except after c

>or when sounded as 'a' as in neighbor or weigh

>or when it’s WEIRD

"I before E except after C, unless it’s my feisty neighbor Keith who lifts weights. Weird.”

https://languagemagazine.com/2023/01/03/can-teaching-english...

I lost a school spelling bee because I couldn’t remember if my word used ie or ei. I panicked and used “i before e”, leading to me appropriately failing to spell “forfeit”.

You’re so right: Fuck you, it’s English. Good luck memorizing all the exceptions!

"I before E except after C, but only when the sound is E" is the version I've heard, so "weird" (and "weir") are not exceptions. (In standard British English the vowel in "weird" is /ɪə/, not /iː/.)

Engl. "weird" (happen, to become) ~ German "werden" (will [be]).

Regarding irregularity of the English language, there's the well-known urban verse:

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation's OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhymes with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche! Is a paling stout and spikey? Won't it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It's a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough? Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is give it up!

When copying someone else's work it's generally a good idea to at least attribute it to them:

https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

The above comment is a copy of "The Chaos" by Gerard Noist Trenité without the line breaks and with a bunch of the verses slammed together instead of separated out.

Originally, there was no road on the ground; it was formed by the many people walking on it. Similarly, a word didn't exist originally; it came into being as many people used it.

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