Where does the word nerd come from?
Believe it or not, we may have good ol’ Dr. Seuss to thank. In his classic If I Ran the Zoo, which we will all remember from early grade school, the word nerd appears, describing a creature that the story’s narrator, Gerald McGrew, wishes to gather into his menagerie, among others: “...an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!”
Sci-fi author Philip K. Dick deployed the term in 1973, using an alternate spelling – nurd – but he was presaged by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where yet another spelling knurd (drunk backwards) was used in a student publication in 1965. Newsweek goes back further still, mentioning in 1951 that the term was in use to describe “a limp, ineffectual, or uninteresting person” (per Wiktionary).
The Online Etymology Dictionary claims that the term is a variation of the word nert, which is a variation of nut, meaning stupid or crazy.
And the word spread through the Baby Boomers, per Wikipedia, by way of its ubiquity on the TV sitcom Happy Days. (As a point of historical continuity, we feel compelled to point out that its use on a television show set in the late 1950s represents a breathtaking anachronism, as it is obvious by the timeline established above that the word could not possibly have ever fallen upon the ears of Richie, Potsie, Ralph, or Fonzie.)
At any rate, Happy Days aside, the term is certainly ubiquitous today, and thanks to the more contemporary sitcom The Big Bang Theory, it is now a badge of honor.
Even so, it seems important to point out that nerd is now a catch-all term describing not one but several stereotypes – not all of them positive.
The Wallflower
Sometimes nerd is a pejorative for that individual who is shunned for their social ineptitude or an inability to “fit in” with a particular crowd. On Happy Days, this could be any one of the main characters, who fit in wonderfully with each other but are not exactly the kind of guys who get invited to Cool Kid Parties. On The Big Bang Theory, the social environs is CalTech, where there are no cool kids at all, so it’s a bit trickier to parse: certainly all the main characters sans Penny are wallflowers, but some are less socially offensive than others (Leonard, for instance, is less likely to piss off the chancellor at a faculty cocktail party than Sheldon would be).
And on Happy Days, we hear the main characters inexplicably flinging the term at each other, which is certainly the Potsie calling the kettle black. (On TBBT, there is no point in uttering the word at all.)
The Smartest Kid in the Class
Certainly the word nerd has expanded from a designator of social ineptitude to a label implying bookish and intellectual, and these are not bad labels in themselves, by any means.
But it is also true that in many social scenarios, there is little value and even some dishonor in being the smartest kid in the class: it doesn’t earn you points, it robs you of them. Kids who are not remotely capable of rattling off the first 100 prime numbers or digits of pi have an understandable disdain for those who can, and so this is necessarily another context in which nerd becomes a pejorative – so much so that child psychologist David Anderegg notes that high-school nerds often “switch off their lights” and play dumb, in order to be accepted.
Uncool
Paul Graham, in his essay “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, argues differently. Intellect itself is neither a negative nor a positive, he insists, not something that will render a person lovable or not. Further, he questions whether nerds are necessarily socially inept or merely perceived that way because they tend to be unpopular; in the formulation presented in his essay, he points out that nerds tend to invest their free time in pursuits no socially well-adjusted person would undertake – cataloguing every episode of Doctor Who back to the Sixties, for instance, or papering their bedroom walls with photographs taken from the International Space Station. The reason such kids aren’t popular, Graham concludes, isn’t that they are truly socially inept; it’s that they “don’t have time for the activities required for popularity.”
I’ll personally vouch for this one. In my entire high school career, I was never invited to a Cool Kids party – I only partied with other nerds. And my primary free-time activity was filming Super 8 sci-fi movies with my nerd pals – not the sort of thing that raises one’s social status.
The 21st Century Nerd
Thanks to The Big Bang Theory and the cultural ascent of real-world nerds like Steve Jobs et al, nerd is less a pejorative than ever. Those who qualify for the designation now wear it as a badge of pride. Collectively, nerd now signals a positive group identity, membership in a social class that is making a difference in the world.
Star Wars paved some of this road, to be sure, as did Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy; both of those are cool as all hell, safe for the masses, yet still unarguably nerd turf. Quoting Darth Vader or Gandalf the Grey in the course of water cooler banter is now kind of impressive; cosplay is no longer considered a DSM symptom. A worthy practitioner can now rattle off the Green Lantern Oath or the Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear at a cocktail party and draw applause, rather than stares. You can even speak in HAL 9000’s voice and get a laugh, rather than banishment.
Are modern nerds any less Wallflower or Smartest Kid or Uncool than were their predecessors? Of course not; but the social cost of these dysfunctions has been heavily discounted as the nerd’s reciprocal cultural stock has risen in value. The Cool People can now roll out I slept with a nerd! as an amusing anecdote, rather than concealing it as a drunken error or a shame to be hidden.
And is this a surprise? Trek nerds will recall that back in the day, young women the world over openly pined for Leonard Nimoy; won’t this generation pine that much more for Robert Downey Jr. and Chrises Evans and Hemsworth?
The point here is openly clear: as a parent raising a nerd, you are blessed: the cultural tide has turned in your favor. You can proceed with your sacred task in the comfort of the realization that the more nerdy you raise this kid to be, the more laughs they’ll get at cocktail parties...
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