Weird word

One of my favorite word histories is the weird story. Most people have seen at least one of the many classical paintings of the Three Graces, three nicely naked ladies also known as the Three Charities. These were ancient Greek goddesses represent good stuff like good will, nature, or good luck. For bad luck there were the Three Fates, or Morai. These were the goddesses of past, present, future or sometimes they are at their spinning wheel dealing out your birth, life, and death. Anyway, they were fates. Not so good as the Graces. In Anglo-Saxon the fates were called the three wyrde. So along comes Shakespeare’s Macbeth who meets the three Weird Sisters who foretell his fate. They were actually, in modern English, the Three Fate Sisters. And they were so scary, strange, and unworldly that weird sisters became remembered for their weirdness. So the word for fate became the word for strange and frightening: weird.