On a whim – what’s one of those? – I wanted to look up the word WEIRD in a good dictionary. (An actual dictionary, in a book and not on a screen. Somehow that also mattered. I am a dinosaur, my blood is still analogue.)

‘Weird’ is a word we use often and imprecisely. Sometimes, yes, weirdly. And this is true of our language overall: while it is highly evolved and, in dictionaries, astonishingly precise, including its ambiguities, we tend to use it lazily. And yet we know exactly what we think we mean, and hope that the listener does too. Words, phrases, sayings, memes, ideas are like stepping stones towards meaning, and a lot of wordless water passes unceasingly between them. We could fall in. Where would it take us?

‘That’s just weird’ is not a nice thing to hear of oneself – suggesting a misfit or a failure or something unclean and better avoided. But the word has weight and feels old – and turns out to have Middle English, Old English and Saxon lineage and honourable antecedents.

Weird: 1. Suggestive of or relating to the supernatural; eerie. 2. Strange or bizarre. 3. Of or relating to fate or the Fates (as in the Weird Sisters, the three mythical Fates). Also usages in Scots relating to fate and predicting one’s destiny (to dree one’s weird). (From Collins English Dictionary, 7th ed., 2005.)

Roots include: Old English (ge)wyrd, destiny; related to weorthan, to become, Old Norse urthr, bane, Old Saxon wurd. There is here a link to WORTH, in a sense that is not in modern use – a verb, meaning to happen or betide (‘woe worth the day’). This also turns on fabulous roots including, again, weorthan, plus Old Frisian wertha, Old Saxon werthan, modern German werden, Old Norse vertha, Gothic wairthan – and the Latin vertere, meaning ‘to turn’.

All in all, then, ‘weird’ has to do with the unknown, future destiny – and, more broadly, becoming. Why do we use it to mean strange, non-conforming, often in a pejorative sense? Is it just that we tend to fixate on images and try in turn to fix them, to resist change, to believe that we have grasped and understood and bought life as a known quantity, rather than submitting to (and participating in) its unceasing emergence? Something or someone ‘weird’ is then just anything that doesn’t fit the model we have tried to build, or that threatens to deform it or infect it. Or perhaps, more healthily, it describes something outside our own culture, our own spiritual paradigm – but in this case it requires tactful handling, as it may carry something that we need.

I am fascinated by the link, distant yet vivid, with werden in modern German. This is a potent verb in that language. It means ‘to become’: das Kind will klug werden, the child wants to become clever. It is used to form the future:wir werden gehen, we will go. It is also one of the main forms for the passive voice: das Geschirr soll gespült werden, the crockery needs to be washed up. So, all of this is fate or becoming – what is going to happen, or what is happening to one (by external forces). And its participles mirror some of the archaic forms above: ich werde, du wirst, er wird; er wurde, sie wurden, es ist geworden. All this ancientness, out and proud in the here and now.

My mind races ahead – does this cluster of words also join with ‘word’ itself? No, it turns out, seemingly not. Word – the lexical unit that fits between the spaces in a sentence – comes from wort, orth, waurd – or also verbum or indeed the Sanskrit vratà, ‘command’. So, a red herring, perhaps just too weird.

It’s remarkable, this discovery – that what we habitually use to fend off the unknown or the uncomfortable actually stems from what is ever-fresh, from becoming, which is the response of all life to sheer being. Unnerving, perhaps. Unfamiliar. Curious also that ‘worth’ has not only to do with value but also with becoming or destiny. And, assuming that the lexicologists at Collins were right, is the link in the latter case with turning. Another sense of constant change or becoming. All these aspects represent a complete shift of sense.

Of course it is easy to take a casual look at old roots and create our own links between them. A lexicologist might not be impressed. But I can’t resist the urge to connect, and thereby to see language in clearer light than that of dusty habit, even if language is necessarily the dwelling-place of dusty habit.