This one is just weird:
adjective
noun
SCOTTISH (archaic)
Definitely archaic - I've never heard it applied as such in common use.
verb
NORTH AMERICAN (informal)
There's the common one, disbelief and alienation.
Weird things are scary unknowns,
Weird people; threatening outsiders.
How did we get here from there?
weird (adj.)
c. 1400, "having power to control fate, from wierd (n.), from Old English wyrd "fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates," literally "that which comes," from Proto-Germanic *wurthiz (source also of Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt "fate," Old Norse urðr "fate, one of the three Norns"), from PIE *wert- "to turn, to wind," (source also of German werden, Old English weorðan "to become"), from root *wer- (3) "to turn, bend" (see versus). For sense development from "turning" to "becoming," compare phrase turn into "become."
The sense "uncanny, supernatural" developed from Middle English use of weird sisters for the three fates or Norns (in Germanic mythology), the goddesses who controlled human destiny. They were portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, as in "Macbeth" (and especially in 18th and 19th century productions of it), which led to the adjectival meaning "odd-looking, uncanny" (1815); "odd, strange, disturbingly different" (1820). Related: Weirdly; weirdness.
That took a weird turn.
So now we're in a period considering "the power to control fate,"
The ability of a person to guide or make their own destiny,
strange,
abnormal,
unusual,
unnatural.
By making the active, passive,
By making the worker into the employee,
Our own linguistics pacify us.
They normalize subjugation, and compliance.
By making the power to control one's fate a trivial oddity,
Our language disenfranchises and disempowers us...
Until we become Liberated:
Late 16th century: from Latin liberat- ‘freed,’ from the verb liberare, from liber ‘free.’
Liber, depending on usage, means either "free" or "book."
But I don't think you can have one without the other.
*** yawns ***
It's getting late here.
Gnight all.
