#oneaday Day 85: Find another word than “weird”

It seems that people of a certain — I don’t even know if it’s age, but it’s definitely a specific social group of some description — are incapable of describing something via any word other than “weird”. This is particularly apparent on YouTube, where there is a veritable surfeit of videos called, simply, “[x] is weird”.

Here’s one:

And another:

Here’s a brand new one with no views:

And here is part of what is apparently a whole series of the bloody things:

What these videos inevitably go on to describe is something that is emphatically not weird, usually rather mundane and which could have probably been better served with a more descriptive title.

At this point I’m sure someone desperately wants to bring up the American left-wing tendency to refer to anyone on the right of them as “weird”, which is a current trend in the run up to the next U.S. presidential election. This is a separate issue — and one which, I have to say, I’m kind of on board with, because nothing shuts down a raging idiot like telling them they’re being weird and making an idiot out of themselves — so I am not including it in the trend I am describing above, which has been around a lot longer.

I often find that the “[x] is weird” trend goes hand in hand with the tendency for Certain Types of People (again, not necessarily age-specific, but a definite type) to write things all in lower-case. You can see this in the first video example above. Nothing in the video title or the text on the thumbnail uses a capital letter, even when one is really needed (such as in the word “I”, on the name “Tony Hawk” and the abbreviation “THPS” for “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater”). And, again, the people who do this sort of thing often like to make out that exceedingly mundane things are somehow outlandishly remarkable.

I’m not even entirely sure why this bothers me so much. I think it’s that “[x] is weird” does the video (it’s usually a video), the subject matter the video is covering and the creator of the video a disservice. I’m sure many of these “[x] is weird” videos are actually quite interesting, but I am, at this point, completely put off from clicking on them almost as much as if I see “I played 100 days of [game]”.

I guess it’s just another example of Stuff That Isn’t For Me. And judging by the viewing figures on a couple of those videos I posted above, it seems I’m in a bit of a minority. But still. If you ever catch me posting a video with the name “[game name] is WEIRD” you have full permission to slap me. Even if I’m covering a French home computer game from the early ’90s. Now those really WERE weird.

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