I really tried to ignore it and let it go as just another passing trend. It’s not my language, not my culture and not my battleground, but it’s hard. It hurt me seeing it slowly spreading and getting bigger. What made me decide to vent was reading someone talk about their struggles and seeing a familiar sentence that might be familiar to all: “I was a weird child”.
Being weird is not usually a problem, the issue usually is people being incapable to accept what they consider weird. Different is not wrong, queer is not wrong, expressing yourself and living the only way you know when it’s not hurting anyone around you is definitely not wrong, even if it doesn’t conform with society.
All these horrible people hate being called weird because it’s what they having been calling us the whole time, but in more specific ways. I feel using it as a slur now just reinforces the negative connotations and validate their view.
Update: semantic satiation to the rescue. Weird became a meme and a trend everyone wanted to take part and use regardless of it making sense.
It’s not rambling, we need this extreme detail of clarification specifically because of this increased push of arbitrary words into slur territory (not IMO, but that’s where the outrage is coming from.)
In addition to that, we have such a high overlap of meanings that when this push does occur, it’s done so to remove other meanings from the word.
Weird used to be a wide combination of things. Now it’s being attempted to be turned into an insult in a way that it wasn’t quite an insult before.
Basically, the inflection of language has slowly been dying as critical thinking and literacy skills have dropped. You used to be able to call someone weird and based on your inflection, people understood the context.
Inflection from context isn’t reliable anymore, because if someone wants it to mean something else, that’s what it will mean to them. (And less pointed, sometimes people don’t realize words can mean different things. But this doesn’t happen as often)