Has one word ever decided an election?
It’s possible we’re about to find out. The word in question is “weird” — a term even a 5-year-old could understand, and one that’s proving extraordinarily effective in Kamala Harris‘ bid to defeat Donald Trump in November.
It’s a word that since 1980 has skyrocketed in popularity, according to a graph on Google’s Ngram Viewer, which only accounts for usage until 2022. That line is going to jump even higher once it reaches 2024.
It all began with a casual insult tossed out by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and has since caught on like a viral wildfire. The “weird” label has proven so sticky and effective, it may have even played a significant role in Harris’ decision to choose Walz as her running mate. At their first joint appearance at a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday, there it was again: “These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell,” Walz said, referring to Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance.
It’s a fascinating development in the evolution of a word that has morphed with the ever-changing times, says Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University Bloomington who specializes in the history, theory and practice of lexicography.
The word dates back to the Middle Ages, when it first came into use as the Old English “wyrd,” a noun that roughly translated to “the fated thing.” It made the leap to adjective with its reference to the three “weird sisters” — aka the witches — in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, penned around 1606.
“They’re in contact with the supernatural, they understand and foretell fate — so Macbeth should have taken their weirdness seriously,” Adams says. “That’s where it begins. It’s really a term about the supernatural.”
But once it became an adjective, weird grew in popularity — and the more popular it got, the vaguer its meaning became. “Adjectives tell us the quality of things, and humans love to evaluate things in their language,” Adams explains. “So you get a hold of a word like weird, and you can use it in a lot of different contexts to evaluate people and their behavior with a fair amount of nuance.”
As a result, over the centuries, weird stopped having relationship to the supernatural and came to mean things like odd, eccentric, unusual or unexpected.
By the 1920s, it begins to find its way into popular culture by way of Weird Tales, the fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine that first published H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories, beginning with The Call of Cthulhu, in 1928. In 1953, EC Comics published the first issue of the fantastical Weird Science comics, which ran in tandem with a sister publication, Weird Fantasy.
By dramatizing the uncanny other, weird thereby became a term of enticement — at least to the young males who read the comics. Weird Science would later license its name to a 1985 John Hughes film starring Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr. and Kelly LeBrock as their computer-built dream woman — transforming weird yet again into something cool, funny and sexy.
By the late 1950s, the word returned to noun form in “weirdo,” which is “the extreme personalization of it,” says Adams, noting, “I don’t think Gov. Walz or Vice President Harris has called Trump a ‘weirdo’ yet, right? But when it took that turn in meaning, then it really became of term of dislike, discomfort or disrespect for another person.”
It was in the 1960s that the phrases “weirded” or “weirded out” come into use — cousins to the similar-in-nature “freaked” and “freaked out.”
“When that happens, that picks up the sense of, ‘This is problematic for me. I’m made uneasy by it. It’s alienating,’” Adams says. “For people who are from that period, the associations for weird are frankly pretty negative.” Harris and Walz were both born in 1964 — placing them in the sweet spot for that usage.
But then something interesting began to happen in the 1970s — and we have the singer of “Like a Surgeon” and “Eat It” to thank for it. In 1977, Alfred Yankovic was a second-year architecture student at California Polytechnic State University, whose dormmates nicknamed him “Weird Al,” a derogatory reference to his nerdy eccentricities.
But when he got a job as a disc jockey at the university radio station, Yankovic reclaimed the insulting label and made it part of his professional persona. (Asked for comment, Yankovic’s manager said the comedy icon “prefers to stay beyond the fray on this.”)
With the rise of Weird Al on the pop charts, so came a dramatic shift in connotations around the word — from something unpleasant and negative to something quirky and lovable. Nearly parallel to Yankovic’s rise was the rise in popularity of the phrase “weird and wonderful,” which peaked in 1993.
“If I were working for the Trump campaign, which I’m not, I’d latch onto that catchphrase, which uses weird as an approving term,” says Adams. “‘Weird and wonderful.’ You can find in the journalism of the 1970s and forwards. If I were on the Trump team, I’d say, ‘Well, of course he’s weird! He’s weird and wonderful!’ That would represent a different type of weirdness from the one Democrats are using to frame the former president.”
Entering the aughts, the word shifts yet again — to something so positive, it’s worth fighting for. The phrase “Keep Austin Weird” was first uttered by Red Wassenich in 2000. Wassenich was a local author who, according to lore, called into local radio station KOOP and offered up the challenge along with a donation. He then began printing the slogan on bumper stickers and launched the website keepaustinweird.com.
Like the current use of weird, Wassenich’s coinage proved enormously popular. The slogan was ultimately adopted by the Austin Independent Business Alliance to promote small business and appears on T-shirts, hats and mugs. The phrase has since been adopted by Portland (in 2003), Louisville (in 2005) and Indianapolis (in 2013).
“My daughter, bless her, a 12-year-old, has a wonderful sweatshirt that says ‘Everyone is weird,’” Adams says. “It’s a way of saying, ‘If you’re weird, you’re interesting, because you are authentically who you are.’ That does hearken back to its original meaning, this fatalistic notion that you are who you are, and that’s a respectable thing to be.”
And all it took was one plain-speaking, 60-year-old vice presidential hopeful from Minnesota to bring weird back to its icky, othering connotations.
“In the mouth of somebody as old as Gov. Waltz, I think it reflects a more 1970s sense — that the weird thing is under close scrutiny because it doesn’t fit into our expectations of how things should be,” Adams says.
