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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2979 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 28, 2023

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I saw this when Scott Alexander responded to it, and read the follow-up comments with interest.

It has probably been 20 years since I last "updated" my sense of "nerd versus geek," and I have to say--I was until this week thoroughly under the impression that "nerd" referred to the academically inclined (narrow and idiosyncratic, but challenging, interests) and "geek" mostly meant pop-culture inclined (narrow and idiosyncratic, but unchallenging, or at least more artistic, interests). People could be either; people could be neither; people could be both. A Shakespeare geek loves Shakespeare; a Shakespeare nerd writes academic journal articles about how Ophelia was a proto-feminist. A science geek "Fucking Loves Science," but a science nerd actually knows things like Maxwell's equations and how to apply them. A sports geek collects memorabilia, but a sports nerd can quote you statistics, obscure rules, and probably kick your ass at fantasy football. In other words, it was never about what was "good"--you could be a geek or a nerd about things other people valued, or not. It was just about the level and quality of your interest in narrow and idiosyncratic things.

I cannot overemphasize just how much I really thought this was something my linguistic community (i.e. the Anglophone internet) had pretty well settled no later than, say, 2010.

Of course, in the 1970s and 1980s, these were both mostly words with a pejorative connotation; between "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) and Bill Gates becoming a billionaire (1987) by the 1990s "nerd" had been pretty well rehabilitated, and by "The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) "geek" had mostly come to cover pop culture afficionados, perhaps as part of the rise of the "geek girl." A lot of this kind of tapers off post-Awokening (circa 2014), possibly because the most relevant pop culture properties prior to 2014 was clearly dominated by "problematic" (i.e. white, male) creators and fans.

So the idea of nerds as people who like things that aren't good is just totally alien to me. This article talks about some interesting phenomena, but I think it butchers several otherwise-useful words to get there.

I would say your definition of nerd and geek is spot on. I have no idea WTF the author here is on about with saying nerds are people who like things that aren't good. That's not what it means, nor has it ever been what it means.

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