We introduce the new notion of a conjugate weight function and provide a detailed study of this operation and its properties. Then we apply this knowledge to study classes of ultradifferentiable functions defined in terms of fast growing weight functions in the sense of Braun-Meise-Taylor and hence violating standard regularity requirements. Therefore, we transfer recent results shown by the author and D.N. Nenning from the weight sequence to the weight function framework. In order to proceed and to complete the picture we also define the conjugate associated weight matrix and investigate the relation to conjugate weight sequences via the corresponding associate weight functions. Finally, as it has already been done in the weight sequence case, we generalize results by M. Markin from the small Gevrey-setting and show how the corresponding non-standard ultradifferentiable function classes can be used to detect boundedness of normal linear operators on Hilbert spaces (associated with an evolution equation problem).