Flipping the Script

I’ve been trying to say the word ‘weird’ a little less. It’s a holdover from my small town days when anything different was to be kept at arms’ length. I would rather stop disparaging things I don’t quite understand, so when I overheard my son use a modern-day synonym for ‘weird’, it struck a better chord. “I dunno, is it niche that I do that?” he asked his girlfriend. That’ll do just fine, I thought. Language is in constant flux, sometimes changing in response to other languages it encounters, sometimes evolving through well-understood processes. It reminded me of this post, which originally ran in February 2020. “Freak.” “Monster.” “Gorilla.” During this year’s Super Bowl Sunday, Shakira and J-Lo were not the only hyperboles on show. Both the official sports commentary and its online counterparts were littered with back-handed terms of admiration tinged with disgust. Why is it, I wondered, that these off-putting words are preferred over unambiguous compliments like ‘exceptional…

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