My mother thinks it’s a derogatory term. Whenever I try to explain to her why I made a decision she wouldn’t have, I describe myself as weird. “No you’re not,” she responds so swiftly it seems automatic.

“Weird isn’t bad, Mom.”

“You’re not weird.”

I beg to differ.

I’m a good speller but like any other English speaker I can get confused about which comes first in a word: “i” or “e.” I remember the mnemonic “I before E except after C, or when sounded A, as in neighbor or weigh,” but that didn’t work for the word “science” and now look at “weird.”

So when I ran across information about the origin of “weird” a decade or two ago, I inserted it into the dictionary I carry in my head. My internal entry says “weird” was originally “wayward.” It collapsed over time because of human mouth physiology, and before it contracted to what we see today it carried an umlaut: weïrd.

Get it? Way-erd from wayward. That makes sense. And that makes me forever understand which vowel comes first in the word.

Now I’ll look for some authority for what I just typed. I was in the library recently and had a few minutes with the Oxford English Dictionary, but I also had eager grandboys about me, so I didn’t have enough time with the last volume. Today’s brief Internet excursion does not support what I’ve penned above (wird, wyrd from Old English, from 900 or so, and involving the supernatural). For now, wayward is my definition and I’m sticking with it.