There are lots of people today who proudly (or at least happily) describe themselves as nerds, geeks, or both. It’s quite a turnaround, because both words used to have somewhat negative connotations. They’ve also tended to converge in meaning, so that it’s not really clear what the difference is, if any (and if you’re about to loudly protest that of course they’re quite different, then I guess know a couple of words that apply to you).
“Nerd,” which used to be sometimes spelled “nurd,” for a while meant somebody who might be an expert in a very narrow area — usually technical — but inept in everything else, and particularly awkward socially. The National Lampoon published a poster in the 1970s showing an awkward guy in ill-fitting clothes, a plastic pocket protector, a slide rule, and of course thick glasses with black plastic rims. The term wasn’t new in the 70s; it seems to date back to about the 1950s. It might have been coined by Dr. Seuss in If I Ran the Zoo:
“And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Katroo
And bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo,
A Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker too!”
Before “nerd” meant somebody who was at least good at one thing, it was pretty much just a derogatory term that was generally about social ineptitude. That’s the way it was described in Newsweek just a year after If I Ran the Zoo was published:
“Nerds and Scurves: In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve.”
One year would be awfully fast for “nerd” to jump from a minor term in a Dr. Seuss book to Detroit slang quoted in a national magazine. So maybe “nerd” was already in use when Dr. Seuss used it. Unless, of course, somebody in Detroit in 1951 wanted to pull a fast one on an annoying reporter by telling him “oh, sure, we call those guys nerds now.”
“Geek” is a lot older than “nerd”; it’s been around since the 1800s. Similar to “nerd,” it was originally just a person who was foolish; unimpressive in every way. It wasn’t until the 1950s that “geek” began, like “nerd” to allow for expertise in one area. There’s an urban legend that the word “geek” originally meant a performer in a circus side show, especially one who did some bizarre act like biting the head off an animal. “Geek” was used that way in the early 1900s, but it was in use well before then, and its circus association was just another usage; that’s not where it came from.
The origin of “geek” is just as mysterious as the original source of “nerd”. One theory is that it comes from the word “geck,” which means — or meant — a fool, and dates back to the 1500s at least. But “geck” pretty much disappeared for a couple of centuries, and the idea that it suddenly popped back up as “geek” is a bit farfetched.
As for the difference between a geek and a nerd, there are certainly plenty of opinions. Nowadays they’re both technically adept, and the negative connotations have pretty much disappeared. This is probably as much due to the value of technical ability as it is the diminished importance of dress codes in many situations. Unless you’re in certain industries like fashion, banking, or law, paying little attention to your garb is pretty acceptable nowadays. That’s probably because the nerds and the geeks are now running things!
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