{"id":91018,"date":"2015-10-19T13:23:08","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T17:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91018"},"modified":"2015-10-19T14:47:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T18:47:20","slug":"premonitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/19\/premonitions\/","title":{"rendered":"Premonitions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Yeah, real spooky, Austin.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
To you they have show\u2019d some truth. \u2014Macbeth<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the Austin airport, there is an ad for a major national bank. \u201cYou keep it weird,\u201d it says. \u201cWe\u2019ll keep your rates low.\u201d (Okay, so I\u2019m paraphrasing that second part\u2014I stopped paying attention.) It refers, of course, to the famous Keep Austin Weird campaign launched in the early aughts by the\u00a0Austin Independent Business Alliance. The movement was designed to promote small businesses and maintain the place\u2019s idiosyncratic character, and was later adopted by cities around the country in the face of corporate encroachment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You see Keep Austin Weird merch everywhere in the city, on mugs and tees and coffee carriers, all of it looking as un-weird as possible. But this bank ad was next-level. It was, as magazine people might say, almost too on-the-nose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Growing up in my house, weird<\/em> was a bad word. We were banned from using it: at that time, it was in wide currency with kids, and my dad in particular felt it was a thoughtless way of dismissing anything\u2014or anyone\u2014different, new. Things that might have been so-called weird <\/em>had to be more closely considered. Were they in fact merely strange? Unusual? Unfamiliar?\u00a0Weird\u00a0<\/em>was to be used only in its literal sense, to denote the uncanny or eerie.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve come to feel my parents were right about this. Not least because in it\u2019s true form,\u00a0weird<\/em>\u00a0is a perfect and beautiful word,\u00a0onomatopoeic and evocative. (It should be said that the same self-righteousness did not apply to my family\u2019s pet insult,\u00a0conventional.\u00a0<\/em>We tossed it around like grass seed.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little sad to see\u00a0weird<\/em>\u2014which still carries with it a faint thrill of the forbidden\u2014declawed, as it is in Austin. The same people who a generation ago might have lobbed the word as an insult now might proudly identify as weird<\/em> because they, say, wear dark-frame glasses or like to eat peanut butter straight from the jar or do their business with Citibank. Bob Dylan does IBM ads, after all. The world, despite our best efforts, is not a weird place\u2014even if it is a scary one.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:To you they have show\u2019d some truth. \u2014Macbeth In the Austin airport, there is an ad for a major national bank. \u201cYou keep it weird,\u201d it says. \u201cWe\u2019ll keep your rates low.\u201d (Okay, so I\u2019m paraphrasing that second part\u2014I stopped paying attention.) It refers, of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[15225,6921,19844,2046,19842,19845,8226,19843,7415,8712,12051,15199,15427,2393],"class_list":["post-91018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-airports","tag-austin","tag-banning","tag-business","tag-commercialism","tag-conventional","tag-family","tag-keep-austin-weird","tag-merchandise","tag-mugs","tag-slogans","tag-traveling","tag-usage","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLet\u2019s Use \u201cWeird\u201d in the True Sense of the Word<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Sadie Stein\u2019s family, \u201cweird\u201d is banned from usage except in its strictly correct form\u2014a wise rule in an increasingly un-weird world.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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