i before e, except after w?

I mean we're shrinks, we deal with the weird everyday. If anyone knows weird, it's us.

So I get this email from Roy. Stop spelling it "wierd" it's "weird" you have it stuck in your head wrong. He's right and he gave me a long list of places on Shrink Rap where weird is misspelled as 'wierd.' Only they weren't all me. Clink did it a couple of times. Sarebear did it in our comment section. I did it a bunch. This is weird. But it is "i before e except after c"...right? Why is weird spelled weirdly?

Maybe I need a new word. Strange. Unusual. Unconventional. Odd. That's a good one, even I can't spell "odd" wrong.

From Wikipedia:

Old English wyrd is a verbal noun formed from the verb weorþan, meaning "to come to pass, to become". The term developed into the modern English adjective weird. Adjectival use develops in the 15th centrury, in the sense "having the power to control fate", originally in the name of the Weird Sisters, i.e. the classical Fates, in the Elizabethan period detached from their classical background as fays, and most notably appearing as the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. From the 14th century, to weird was also used as a verb in Scots, in the sense of "to preordain by decree of fate".

The modern spelling weird first appears in Scottish and Northern English dialects in the 16th century and is taken up in standard literary English from the 17th century. The regular modern English form would have been wird, from Early Modern English werd. The substitution of werd by weird in the northern dialects is "difficult to account for".^[1]

The now most common meaning of weird, "odd, strange", is first attested in 1815, originally with a connotation of the supernatural or portentuous (especially in the collocation weird and wonderful), but by the early 20th century increasingly applied to everyday situations.^[2]

Enough. It's all too weerd. The chinchilla is for Jesse because his preoccupation with the little rodents is kind of ....different.

Oh Poo!

This a blog post about vulture poop. It's a long story, but let me just say that when you're a rock climber there are certain hazzards of the sport that you just have to accept: bats sleeping in crevices, nasty long spinning falls, copperhead snakes and, yes, vulture poop.

Vulture poop is probably the most vile smell I have ever come across, and that includes a four month stint crouched over a formaldehyde-soaked corpse in anatomy lab. It's bad.

The trick with writing a blog post about this is that you have to tie it in somehow with psychiatry. This is problematic since I haven't had any patients with delusions about vultures, vulture obsessions or vulture phobias (does anybody know the word for vulture phobia? Ornithophobia is for birds as a whole). I'm left grasping at nasal straws, so to speak.

I have had patients who smelled bad and patients who suffered from bad smells. If the smell doesn't actually exist, it's an olfactory hallucination. Olfactory hallucinations are rare, much less common than visual or auditory hallucinations. Typical olfactory hallucinations are very unpleasant experiences and are often described as resembling rotting meat, burning rubber or excrement (although not necessarily vulture poop). I've seen olfactory hallucinations in a patient with major depression and in one or two psychotic patients. Another "bad smell" illness is a rare but interesting delusional disorder known as olfactory reference syndrome. In this disorder the patient is convinced that he or she smells bad and that others around them can also smell them. Olfactory reference patients may shower multiple times a day to get rid of the "smell", or may seek repeated medical consultations to find the source of the problem. Like most delusional disorders, olfactory reference syndrome tends to be resistant to medication. I've seen two cases of this disorder and they both improved (but didn't get completely well) on neuroleptics.

Olfactory hallucinations can be seen in other medical conditions, specifically in migraine sufferers and in people with seizure disorders. In this case the smell generally precedes the onset of the headache or seizure and is sometimes described as a 'burning rubber' smell. Treatment of the odor depends upon control of the underlying condition.

So there's my vulture poop post. I even made it relevant to psychiatry. Climb on!

And for those without cathartophobia (my proposed name for vulture fear, after the genus cathartidae):

The Turkey Vulture Society