I've had conversations in the past about the difference between geeks and nerds. We had agreement that there was an industrious quality to geekdom that is lacking in nerds. Steve has his a broadened coinage for nerd which I think is near-synonymous with "spaz" ("he is a raquetball nerd."), but I do buy his basic premise, which is that anyone can be into something to an uncool degree, regardless how "cool" that thing might be regarded.
Anyway, this chart brings in the third leg of the milking stool.
4 comments:
The Venn diagram breaks down the various subgroups pretty legitimately. of course, there's always controversy over which of the names maps to each subgroup. John Hughes, for example defined "geek" as someone who was awkward as a teenager but who would grow up into someone cool & relatively normal (as typified by Anthony Michael Hall), but in the circles my brother traveled in, geek was a much lower form of life than nerd - his nerd was your geek, his geek was your dork.
brilliant!
Perhaps Rick's crowd was SLIGHTLY (I said "slightly"!) tending toward nerdphilia, which would esplain an anti-geek bias. I wasn't aware of geek profiling in the Hughes canon, but I admittedly have not seen "Career Opportunities." Or "Say Anything." (Lloyd Dobler, Lloyd Dobler, I know.)
What's interesting is the general level of understanding that "geek" is a higher whatever than nerd. But the journey of the word geek from its sideshow roots to it's current (fairly specific social) meaning is also pretty interesting. Word nerds get your geek awn.
Well "Say Anything" was Cameron Crowe, not Hughes. I never saw (or, I think, heard of) "Career Opportunities", but it's a written-by, not directed-by, so it's not officially part of the Hughes canon.
I just watched the trailer, though, and got to see a 21-year-old Jennifer Connelly ride a hobby horse.
Post a Comment