Napoleon Dynamite is a dork. He is not a nerd, he is not a geek. Andy Stitzer, of The 40 Year Old Virgin, is a geek, not a dork, or a nerd. Louis Skolnick, from Revenge of the Nerds is yes, a nerd. So what, you may ask, is the difference? And what is an article about geeks, nerds, and dorks, doing in a magazine like SUITE this Valentine's Day?
Well fear not, dear readers, I am here to dispel the mystery, and answer both questions by clearly defining the differences between these oft misunderstood and confused categories. That's right, this article has a social mission, and, I hope, will help you to grow a little bit on the inside, for we all have, or know someone who possesses, one or another of these traits.
Nerd, as a stereotypical or archetypal designation, refers to people of above-average intelligence whose interests (often in science and mathematics) are not shared by mainstream society. The term is most widely used in the United States, but also has some legitimacy in other English speaking countries.
The term nerd, meaning "square" goes back at least to 1951, when Newsweek reported the usage as relatively new in Detroit. By the 1960s, it took on connotations of bookishness as well as social ineptitude. The word itself first appeared in Dr. Seuss's book If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, where it simply names one of Seuss's many comical imaginary animals. The narrator Gerald McGrew claims that he would collect "a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too" for his imaginary zoo. The nerd itself is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross, Chester A. Arthur. Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a column entitled ABC for SQUARES: Nerd -- A Square, Any Explanation Needed? Authorities disagree whether Dr. Seuss's nerd and the Glaswegian nerd are the same. Some claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word was picked up by the five-and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had applied nerd to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a "square."
Another theory of the word's origin sees it as a variation on Mortimer Snerd, the name of Edgar Bergen's ventriloquist dummy. Yet another theory traces the term to Northern Electric Research and Development, suggesting images of employees wearing pocket protectors with the acronym N.E.R.D. printed on them. Finally, oral history at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute holds that the word was coined there, spelled as "knurd" ("drunk" spelled backwards), to describe those who studied rather than partied. (This usage predates a similar coinage of "knurd" by author Terry Pratchett.) The term itself was used heavily in the American 1974-84 television comedy Happy Days which took place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and had been set in the mid-1950s.
The stereotypical nerd image as seen in the mass media and cartoons equates to a young man wearing thick black eyeglasses (preferably broken and taped up with electrical tape), more >>
