FarmerDyke

Hey kid who seems to be in every class I have ever taken in college.  Stop using the word ‘weird’ to describe people of customs or ideas that are strange (meaning not of one’s own or a particular locality, environment, or kind) to you.

No matter what class I am in, there is always someone who raises their hand all the time and says “Its really weird that” in Tanzania (or China or Zanzibar or Uruguay or where-ever-the-fuck) people do X, or people say X. Or that is really weird that gay people (or women or people of color) say X. It makes you look really ignorant. And it pisses me off enough that I can’t concentrate on anything else you are saying. And for some reason, this shit pops up in Anthropology classes all the time, when in theory people there should have heard of this radical idea called cultural relativity. So stop sustaining this sense of self and other. It is damaging.

Do you hear me? This is damaging.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective weird as “suggesting something supernatural; uncanny”. In informal usage, “very strange; bizarre.It goes on to add that to ‘weird someone out’ is to ‘induce a sense of…alienation in someone”.

‘Weird’ is an alienating word, and every time you use it to describe someone not like yourself, especially when your worldview is mainstreamed as the ‘normal’ experience, you are sustaining  perpetuating the roadblocks between what people ...