The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm saying that weird is about something which is not as expected.  If you assign "weird" as an expected quality then you are defying your own definition.

(Truthfully even I don't understand what I'm saying.  That doesn't make it any less valid.)

The dictionary on my mac's dashboard gives the definition of weird as "suggesting something supernatural; uncanny" which is very different to the definition Silvercat is putting forward, of unexpectedness. Just throwing that out there to stir the debate up a bit more :P

Quote from: Kindling--"suggesting something supernatural; uncanny"--

I.e. not as expected in the real world.  But if you include non-real worlds when talking about what is weird you have to include what you expect of them.

I guess my spin on what Kindling is saying is that just because it's unexpected doesn't mean it has to be weird - weird connotes uncanniness or the supernatural or a similar eeriness.  The unexpected event/creature/twist might still be banal or mundane/ordinary and so hardly "weird" as most would define it.

And what I'm saying is that uncanny/supernatural/eerie don't necessarily provoke weird, so stating them as my definition of weird is wrong.  By contrast unexpected holds up.

Hmm, in very general terms, wouldn't weird just be things that stray very far from the norm? Something that is very, very original? In that sense, it is of course affiliated with unexpectedness/unpredictability in that you can't predict something that is completely disconnected from all other ideas you've heard of. Things become less weird if you see it 10 times. Then it's practically normal. Or what?

My point was more that I can see unexpected things still being bland and in a sense ordinary; I don't think that ordinary and expected, and by that token out of the ordinary and unexpected, can be equated.  Your expectation turns out to be incorrect but what you find isn't nearly as unusual as you had expected.  Like say you're journeying towards a city renowned for its strange customs and alien architecture in contrast to the rest of the world.  You expect strangeness and exoticism but don't know exactly what the city's going to look like or how the citizenry are going to react - you don't have anything concrete to base your expectations on, but you still have a general expectation.  But when you get to the city, it turns out it's more or less exactly like the cities you're used to; the strangeness was greatly exaggerated, and the city is a lot less interesting or colorful as you'd been led to believe.  That's unexpected but doesn't seem very weird to me.

In contrast, given my own conception of weird, it doesn't matter that I was expecting a strange city.  If the city is indeed colorful and strange and different from the ones I'm used to, and I wasn't aware of the specifics of that strangeness, the city will be much weirder for me than a more banal, samey city that nonetheless was unexpected.

Quote from: SteerpikeIn contrast, given my own conception of weird, it doesn't matter that I was expecting a strange city.  If the city is indeed colorful and strange and different from the ones I'm used to, and I wasn't aware of the specifics of that strangeness, the city will be much weirder for me than a more banal, samey city that nonetheless was unexpected.

I still find something that has defied my expectations weird, even if the original expectation was more strange than the result.  What's "weird" is that my expectation was defied and now I have to ask why.  I just don't see how strangeness that you expect as a norm is ever weird.  Wouldn't that mean you'd find "normal" life weird?  I mean, the definition of "strange" on my computer contains the word "surprising".  Aren't we both saying that weird things are things that are not as we are accustomed to thinking about them the majority of the time, i.e. what we "expect" of them?

What in the world are you lot talking about? Weird is a level 9 illusion spell.

[spoiler]
and with the defiance of expected debate you all are probably now thinking "dang nomadic is weird..."
[/spoiler]

What it comes down to is just a slightly different way of using the word weird.  For example, the statement "L.A. was just as weird as I'd expected," doesn't sound wrong to me, though it would to you.  *shrug*

So long as my expectations aren't concrete (they don't have specific form) I can still feel certain things are "weird."  But what it comes down to is semantic debate.