Perverts and weirdoes - we need another term
June 1998
Dear Sun,
I am impressed by Barry Freeman's arguments and agree with most
of his points, but I am unhappy with the word 'pervert', which sounds too much
like a gutter press description for anyone the writer disapproves of, with a
nice little salacious whiff of sex to it. Barry refers to weirdoes further on,
but this is not much better. The trouble is that we are all in danger of putting
people we don't approve of (for whatever reason) into hate boxes labelled with
safely general titles which carefully don't explain what we mean. We don't like
being called 'vermin' by John Holland, but that's only an extreme case of
the same labelling process. So we need another term for those who want to buck
the general social trend and offend even the open-minded. What about 'provoker',
'offender' or 'antisocial'? (I've been looking in my Roget, of course!) I am not
very happy with any of these, but the last seems to me to get the idea over
best. If anyone agrees with me in principle, have they any better
suggestions?
Andrew, Swanage
It's a good point. I had a quick glance at 'weirdo' in my
Concise Oxford Thesaurus (I've got a Roget as well, of course, but I find the C
O easier to deal with) and it gives a toothsome selection: eccentric, madman,
madwoman, lunatic, psychotic, crazy, weirdie, nutcase, oddball, queer fish,
crank, freak, loony, psycho, nutter, screwball, nut, kook.
It follows up with a curious example of usage: Why belong to a
club whose members are weirdoes who refuse to talk to one another? Let's be
honest, a few of those synonyms could easily apply to a good many of us - I, for
example, am extremely flattered to be called eccentric! Let's have a little
competition here - a bottle of cheap Algerian vino el mucho collapso, or
something similar, donated by a well-known eccentric, for the member who comes
up with the most appropriate word to describe those whose behaviour is beyond
the pale. It needn't even be a real word - we are always being told that English
is an evolving language, so let's give it a helping spin. Entries to the Editor,
whose decision is final (wow, the power!) by October 31st '98, the winner to be
announced at the AGM.
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