What does “Be weird about something” mean?

According to the article of Washington post (August 18) titled “O’Donnell Walked off CNN interview,” the former Senate candidate from Delaware and tea party favorite walked out during interview by Piers Morgan in his ‘Piers Morgan Tonight’ on August 17 night, when she was asked about her stand on gay marriage by the host.

The hot scene went like this:

When Morgan asked O’Donnell whether she supports gay marriage, she asks about the relevance of the line of questioning.

“You’re getting, you’re borderline being a little bit rude,” was her first response.

Morgan asked her why she was “being so weird about this.”

“I’m not being weird about this, Piers,” she responded, saying she was not running for office. “I’m not being weird, you’re being a little rude,” she said.

As I was unclear about the meaning of “Be weird about something,” I checked a couple of dictionaries and came to the definition of “weird” in Dictionary Cambridge Org. being “very strange and unusual, unexpected or not natural,” together with the examples:

  • Her boyfriend's a bit weird but she's all right.
  • That's weird - I thought I'd left my keys on the table but they're not there.

However, neither the above definition nor example seems to me to just fit to the phrase quoted in the above exchange of tense words. It appears to mean “being weird’ here means “being very irritated, get excited, or vexed” to me. What both Morgan and O’Donnell meant to say with this phrase? .


There are several definitions of weird, one of which is:

Of a strikingly odd or unusual character; strange.

So to "be weird" about something means that you are acting oddly towards something. For example, Morgan probably expected O'Donnell to act in a certain way towards his comment about gay marriage. When O'Donnell instead called him rude, this was not what Morgan was expecting so he felt she was "being weird".


"Being weird" in this case does just mean "strange, unusual". The fact that O'Donnell just responded irritably immediately, with no cause, was strange and unusual in itself. Why would she respond so strongly? It's kind of...weird.

It's as straightforward as that.