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capri0mniA few days ago, I posted an entry with a YouTube video that claimed to use math to settle the question of "What's the difference between Geek and Nerd?"... And said I did not fully agree with the definition. But I never said why. I was actually hoping to clarify my own thoughts through discussion in the reply thread/s. But it turns out, just time was enough (at least, I think it was enough... we'll see by the end of this).
Anyway, the video was basically a recap of this blog post, here: Slackpropagation: On "Geek" Versus "Nerd", wherein the author asserts that the two terms are not synonymous. He's had, he admits, a gut feeling about the two words since a conversation in grad school, that a "geek" is hobby- and collection- oriented, while a "nerd" is skill- and knowledge-oriented, as illustrated by the Simpsons characters Comic Book Guy and Professor Frink, respectively.
To double-check this distinction, he analysed 2.6 million Tweets, to see which words were most often paired with either "Geek" or "Nerd," and sure enough, his hunch panned out: words like "Shiny," "Trendy" and "boxset" were paired with "geek," and words like "education," "history" "thesis" were paired with "nerd." Geeks are fans, but nerds are practitioners...
While I see some value in his methods, I also see a major flaw, which is: words have semi-fluid meanings to begin with, often have more than one meaning, and even more connotations per meaning. So therefore, to twist a phrase from the slightly harder sciences than linguistics: "Correlation does not mean Definition." Without knowing who is using which word and in what context, I think any conclusion based on pairings alone should be treated as "solid" as jelly.
But if I were really honest, I'd say the primary reason I disagree is that I've self-identified as a "geek" for decades, while shunning the term "nerd" (I've softened my heart toward the latter considerably, in recent years, though), and this guy is basically saying that geeks are lightweights and trivial. :-P
Going by this guy's definitions, I should have been self-identifying as "nerd," all these years, instead (I don't collect things, I'm terrible at trivia, and I resent being told that I have to get the latest gadget). But I had my reasons for picking "geek," back then... And they're still my reasons for sticking with it:
1) Whether or not Dr. Seuss was sole inventor of the word,* its use in popular slang (using the spelling he chose, rather than 'nert' [from the 1940s] or 'knurd' supposedly from M.I.T student culture]) spiked after his If I Ran the Zoo was published. And his illuztration shows a grumpy character. And I'm not grumpy -- I'm gregarious.
2) "Nerd," started -- and persisted -- as an insult meant to hurt -- a weapon used by jocks and aimed at the intellectual students (This tradition could be why "nerd" pairs more frequently with specific academic discipline words than "geek" does). But, as I remember it (I was ~19 to ~25 years old when 'geek' first started appearing in the written record -- in its current primary meaning), while "geek" was also intended as an insult, it was also embraced much earlier as a self-identifier as a sort of "Scarlet Letter," by the very people it referred to. And I'd rather use a pride word than a weapon word... Even if "nerd" has become a prideful self-identifier recently (the main reason I've softened toward it).
3) "Geek" has its modern roots in the carnival sideshow performer... And from what I've observed of self-identified geeks, we tend to let our enthusiasm for our pet subjects run away with us -- making spectacles of ourselves (see: #1). And I know this is a quality I possess because whenever we were invited to be guests at a dinner party, my mother would warn me beforehand not to hog the conversation with my favorite topic of the week... (and this could be why "shiny" pairs more with "geek" than it does with "nerd" -- being enthusiastic, we tend to describe things as "shiny" even if they don't seem like that to others, as in: "That collection of Grimms tales is really shiny -- I'm such a wonder tale geek").
4) Though this current meaning is new, the word "Geek" itself is much older (dating back to the 1910s for 'Carnival Performer,' and the 1510s for "village idiot"). And so has seniority.
5) I think there's poetic justice in using a word that once meant "idiot" to now mean "really intelligent (about at least one thing)"
I woke the other day with this thought: "The irony is: all my reasons for choosing 'geek' are the same reasons that 'burrsettles' (the collector of these statistics) concludes I should choose 'nerd,' instead."
It's just that I'm a Word Nerd, and, as a practioner, I care about the mechanics of words, and their history, and how all that makes words tick the way they do... while he is a Numbers Nerd.
*This article -- From M.I.T., btw -- says he was: http://www.mit.edu/people/daveg/Humor/HumorLocker/Incoming/origin.of.nerd
Anyway, the video was basically a recap of this blog post, here: Slackpropagation: On "Geek" Versus "Nerd", wherein the author asserts that the two terms are not synonymous. He's had, he admits, a gut feeling about the two words since a conversation in grad school, that a "geek" is hobby- and collection- oriented, while a "nerd" is skill- and knowledge-oriented, as illustrated by the Simpsons characters Comic Book Guy and Professor Frink, respectively.
To double-check this distinction, he analysed 2.6 million Tweets, to see which words were most often paired with either "Geek" or "Nerd," and sure enough, his hunch panned out: words like "Shiny," "Trendy" and "boxset" were paired with "geek," and words like "education," "history" "thesis" were paired with "nerd." Geeks are fans, but nerds are practitioners...
While I see some value in his methods, I also see a major flaw, which is: words have semi-fluid meanings to begin with, often have more than one meaning, and even more connotations per meaning. So therefore, to twist a phrase from the slightly harder sciences than linguistics: "Correlation does not mean Definition." Without knowing who is using which word and in what context, I think any conclusion based on pairings alone should be treated as "solid" as jelly.
But if I were really honest, I'd say the primary reason I disagree is that I've self-identified as a "geek" for decades, while shunning the term "nerd" (I've softened my heart toward the latter considerably, in recent years, though), and this guy is basically saying that geeks are lightweights and trivial. :-P
Going by this guy's definitions, I should have been self-identifying as "nerd," all these years, instead (I don't collect things, I'm terrible at trivia, and I resent being told that I have to get the latest gadget). But I had my reasons for picking "geek," back then... And they're still my reasons for sticking with it:
1) Whether or not Dr. Seuss was sole inventor of the word,* its use in popular slang (using the spelling he chose, rather than 'nert' [from the 1940s] or 'knurd' supposedly from M.I.T student culture]) spiked after his If I Ran the Zoo was published. And his illuztration shows a grumpy character. And I'm not grumpy -- I'm gregarious.
2) "Nerd," started -- and persisted -- as an insult meant to hurt -- a weapon used by jocks and aimed at the intellectual students (This tradition could be why "nerd" pairs more frequently with specific academic discipline words than "geek" does). But, as I remember it (I was ~19 to ~25 years old when 'geek' first started appearing in the written record -- in its current primary meaning), while "geek" was also intended as an insult, it was also embraced much earlier as a self-identifier as a sort of "Scarlet Letter," by the very people it referred to. And I'd rather use a pride word than a weapon word... Even if "nerd" has become a prideful self-identifier recently (the main reason I've softened toward it).
3) "Geek" has its modern roots in the carnival sideshow performer... And from what I've observed of self-identified geeks, we tend to let our enthusiasm for our pet subjects run away with us -- making spectacles of ourselves (see: #1). And I know this is a quality I possess because whenever we were invited to be guests at a dinner party, my mother would warn me beforehand not to hog the conversation with my favorite topic of the week... (and this could be why "shiny" pairs more with "geek" than it does with "nerd" -- being enthusiastic, we tend to describe things as "shiny" even if they don't seem like that to others, as in: "That collection of Grimms tales is really shiny -- I'm such a wonder tale geek").
4) Though this current meaning is new, the word "Geek" itself is much older (dating back to the 1910s for 'Carnival Performer,' and the 1510s for "village idiot"). And so has seniority.
5) I think there's poetic justice in using a word that once meant "idiot" to now mean "really intelligent (about at least one thing)"
I woke the other day with this thought: "The irony is: all my reasons for choosing 'geek' are the same reasons that 'burrsettles' (the collector of these statistics) concludes I should choose 'nerd,' instead."
It's just that I'm a Word Nerd, and, as a practioner, I care about the mechanics of words, and their history, and how all that makes words tick the way they do... while he is a Numbers Nerd.
*This article -- From M.I.T., btw -- says he was: http://www.mit.edu/people/daveg/Humor/HumorLocker/Incoming/origin.of.nerd
