We must stress, from the outset, that to be a nerd is not an entirely learned skill.
Nerds occur in nature: Gentoo penguins use D&D-style artifacts in their mating negotiations; Amazonian lizards can do Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. And we’ve all seen the videos of the horses-and-math thing.
The point is, nerds are born that way; you were, right? Is there any chance in the world you would have not become a nerd, in the long run? Of course not! It was your destiny.
And so it is with your genetic heirs, who have nerd built into their DNA. You don’t have to worry about it being there; your job is not to create their inner nerd, your job is to nurture it.
So let’s examine, briefly, those inborn traits and tendencies that affirm your offspring’s genetic booty. Let’s look for evidence!
You undoubtedly straighten a bit and feel a whisper of pride at that, right? You yourself are bursting with evidence of the nerd gene! Well, take a breath, fanboy; we’re not talking about how many digits of pi you’ve mastered, or the time you beat Chessmaster 9000 in less than 20 moves, or your perfect rendition of Captain Kirk’s “Risk is Our Business” speech. We’re talking about more fundamental, subtle indicators.
Here are the biggies!
The Natural Nerd Loves Books More Than People
You know this one, right? It’s been with you since grade school; given a choice between recess and playing with your friends and settling into study hall with a Danny Dunn or Encyclopedia Brown book, - well, it’s not really a choice at all, is it?
And it’s the same today, admit it: your friends have invited you over Saturday evening. A new book rests on the end table next to the couch, calling your name. The dust jacket is sultry-smooth, as-yet unblemished with the smear of your fingerprints. You pick the book up gingerly, like a lover taking his partner’s soft, sinuous hand. You inhale deeply, breathing in that intoxicating scent... you feel yourself stimulated... aroused... beyond all reason, and – party? What party?
You have moments like this all the time. And you always have, all the way back to childhood.
And let’s not even get started on bookstores. The smell of a bookstore is – well, it’s a damn brothel, isn’t it?
You’ll see this in your child.
And when I was a child, anyone who was watching would have seen it when my grandfather came to visit, or when we went to see him; he would always have a new Hardy Boys book for me. I can scarcely describe the eagerness this cultivated in me; I knew it was coming, every time, and the anticipation was Christmas-morning-intense.
Among my own nerds, it was the Ender books for my son; Lord of the Rings for my youngest daughter. And the Witcher series for my grandson.
But it’s my older daughter, Sandy, who’s the true book nerd in my gaggle; she is voracious, and always has been, since her teen years. She still plows through several books a week. And she reads everything I write, which cannot help but endear her to me. Not that she needs to, of course; she’s clearly a nerd after my own heart.
The Natural Nerd Takes Perverse Pride in Their Vocabulary
The Word Nerd exists in many forms, from the Grammar Nazi to the Spelling Bee Diva. For myself, it was the long words: in fifth grade, I took tremendous satisfaction in pronouncing (and spelling) pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis perfectly.2 I believed it, at the time, to be the longest word in the world.
Imagine my obscene delight when I came across a word that could actually beat it, and mastered that one, too: osseocaynisanguineoviscericartilagininervomedullary.
This was enough to flaunt my nerd cred in grade school, but more subtle challenges beckoned: in high school, the objective was to work the word prodigious into a sentence when speaking in front of the class, or to find a place for quintessential in private conversation with Mr. Schenk, my English teacher. And on date nights, the threaded needle was a successful deployment of resplendent and/or pulchritudinous.
This one is elective, of course; your young nerd may or may not be a Word Nerd, there’s just no telling. I was constantly impressed, over the years, when one of mine would emit a word beyond their years in casual conversation without any seeming awareness – when Steve called me “meretricious”, for instance, or when Trey found the Wiggles “scintillating”.
You can also have some real fun with this, if you’re so inclined: even if you’re not a Grammar Nazi, you can play the role of one, when you’re out in the world with your little nerd. Did a sign in a store use IT’S incorrectly? Point it out, and mock it with a hearty laugh! Is there a YOUR or a THERE in your path that’s shamefully misused? Pause and give your little genius an opportunity to notice, and mock for themselves! Train them to never let a misplaced apostrophe go by, and give yourself some much-deserved entertainment in the process...
The Natural Nerd Actually Reads the Encyclopedia
If there’s one object Father Odin deposited on the earth exclusively for nerds, it is the encyclopedia.
For all the non-believers, the encyclopedia is a necessary evil – a tool for have-to work, a drudgery, an accepted nuisance. But to a nerd – the encyclopedia is pure joy, wrapped in unbridled ecstasy.
In my own life, it arrived in 1971, courtesy of my parents. I don’t know what motivated them to lay down that much cash – in the Seventies, an encyclopedia was not a digital artifact, but a set of 26 huge hardback books in elegant binding, surely costing three fat digits (a ton of money back then!). They took up most of the living room bookcase.
And I fell deeply in love with these books. I would pick one at random, plop down on the living room couch, and read whatever article happened to present when I opened it. (This was the equivalent, of course, of the modern practice of randomly surfing one’s Internet feed until some article presents itself and calls out to be read. Back then, you see, we had to work for it.)
Then there was Volume S.
In Volume S, there was an article dozens of pages long, packed with photos: Space. The story of the exploration of space, from Sputnik through Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo up to 12, when that edition of the encyclopedia had been published.
I read that article again. And again. And again. I read it until I could name every astronaut in all three programs. I read it until I could explain the differences in the rockets each program used. I read them until I understood the mission of each flight.
Part of this was family honor: I had an uncle who worked for a NASA contractor, and this was a point of immense family pride. But uncle or no, that Volume S became my bible.
That’s nerd cred.
Today, of course, we have wikipedia. And the whole rest of the Internet. Infinite knowledge is at our fingertips.
But I still, to this day, plop down on the couch and open an online article at random.
Your young nerds will, too!
The Natural Nerd Needs to Know Everything About Their Particular Interests
It’s not enough to be a nerd, and to read authors that normaloids wouldn’t go near; if a nerd is into Harlan Ellison, that nerd will read all of Harlan Ellison. Or Ursula LeGuin. Or Philip K. Dick. And not just sci-fi; a true nerd will explore Kafka, or Twain, or Vonnegut, and will miss none of it: every last word the author has written must submit to the nerd’s perusal.
For myself, this began in the sixth grade, with Thomas Edison. Having read the encyclopedia article about his life, I became obsessed, and seized upon a Thomas Edison coloring book while on a family vacation, then coloring every page (I found endless discrepancies in the comic book’s biographical claims, I have to tell you, based on my prior studies). I had my dad bring me a manila file folder from his office, and began gathering Edison info. When I mentioned the file to my art teacher at school, she insisted I bring it in so that she could see it for herself. She proceeded to make a note in my own file.
Flash-forward to the Nineties, skipping over dozens of similar incidents in the process: what the hell is a neural network? I came across the term in a list of DARPA offerings in a catalog at the engineering company where I was then working. The Internet had only just begun, so there was not yet a Google to appeal to in answering this question: I had to do it the old-fashioned way, going to the library at the local university and copying articles. This led me to the names Rumelhart and McClelland, and I was off to Hawley-Cooke bookstore to order a pile of volumes that could educate me on this neural network stuff.
This is how it goes with nerds: we have to know everything about whatever it is that fascinates us. We leave no stone unturned.
My youngest, Josie, exemplified this impulse in her obsession with Tolkien: she has sussed out the geography of Middle Earth from the books and movies, and even intuited its resemblance to Europe and the United Kingdom, but tested her own mastery of this geography by drawing the entire map, in excruciating detail, across the entire driveway – a map measuring over 400 square feet. From Hobbiton to Mount Doom, from the forests of Mirkwood to fortress at Dol Amroth, she nailed it.
These obsessions can, of course, become quite practical. My grandson JJ hungers to understand every last quibbling detail about modern computer architecture, so he deep-dives the subject and decides that what his bad-ass, Pentagon-hacking-level gaming computer really needs is to be water-cooled; it keeps heating up over 90 degrees. Within three days of this decision, he has learned how to do it, bought the parts to do it, and actually done it. He immediately saw an internal temperature drop of more than 20 degrees.
That’s nerd cred...
The Natural Nerd Pauses the TV to Look Shit Up
I guess this one, like the vocab thing, might not be a genetic universal – but it certainly surfaced in me.
When I’m watching TV, something will come up in a scene I’m watching, and I have to pause the show and look up whatever it is that caught my attention. I will add whatever tidbit of knowledge I was sparked to acquire to my internal database, and then I will resume the show.
Example: I’m watching the recent documentary MLK/FBI, about how the Bureau harassed and violated the rights of Martin Luther King, Jr. to satisfy the manipulative, authoritarian impulses of J. Edgar Hoover. Time and again, the documentary referenced historical incidents I could recall, adding horrifying details of the FBI’s behind-the-scenes behavior. I must have paused the DVD a dozen times, stopping to go back and read about those incidents.
I do this all the time. It can be something as simple as recognizing Austin Pendleton’s face in Catch-22 and confirming that he was in A Beautiful Mind 30 years later, or watching The Age of Adaline, about an immortal woman, and pausing to read up on telemeres. Pause, look up... pause, look up...
This does not endear me one little bit to those who live with me. They tend to hide the remote.
You must not, must not, must not hide the remote, when it’s your own young nerd doing the pausing! On the contrary, take the time to discuss whatever they’re looking up...
The Natural Nerd Lives for Chess, Puzzles, or Logic Problems
When I was in junior high – excuse me, “middle school” - there was a book in our school library that me and my study hall pals would fight over: Brain Puzzler’s Delight, a classic compendium of logic puzzles that we would pounce on when we’d zipped through our homework.
These puzzles were generally logic exercises bidding us to extricate Alf, Bert, Charlie and Duggie from some conundrum of unresolved geography, time sequence, or distribution of personal attributes solvable only through vigorous logic and scribbled matrices. I solved them all, probably more than once. I have the book in my personal library, all these decades later. I wish I could say I had stolen it.
In the modern era, I am a daily Wordle and Quordle player, have done endless online Scrabble and Words With Friends, and have a chess app that presents me with daily problems. The natural nerd lives for this kind of brain-rub, and it is more often than not a life-long obsession.
Among my nerds, my daughter Sandy is again the pacesetter: she loves those brain puzzle collections you can buy on any newsstand, the ones that mix word games with math games and logic puzzles. I’m kind of her schoolyard dealer here, giving her constant fixes. I even wrote a book of them just for her:
This is the simplest of passions to nurture in your own young nerds: the supply of puzzles is endless, and you can go analog or digital, whatever works. And here, as always, it’s a great idea to lead by example...
The Natural Nerd Questions Everything
This one happens in the mind of every nerd, whether it makes its way to the surface or not.
Nerds, in their own heads, wonder about everything. What is the nature of humans? How did life really come to exist? What caused the Big Bang? Whose fucking idea was it to cancel Firefly?
This one needs no prompting to get it going – it will happen, no matter what – but it’s possible you might need to encourage its expression.
This can take several forms. You can, for instance, start the conversation yourself, as I did with my son, Steve:
“There are lots of different takes, of course, on the true nature of humanity,” I began. “Religion tells us we are innately evil and selfish; anthropology presents us as naturally cooperative; biologists have determined that empathy is a natural feature of all mammals.”
“We are the hungry ones,” he philosophically observed, “on a lightning raid. Just like a river runs, like a fire needs flame.”
“Where did you read that?” I asked, impressed.
“Def Leppard.”
Sandy deep-dives philosophy like she deep-dives puzzles: she loves a good philosophical riddle. But she doesn’t need prompting: if she’s wondering about something, she’ll come right out with it, in a cell phone text at 2am:
How can more complicated life forms come from less complicated ones? The universe is supposed to be breaking down, right? This doesn’t seem consistent. It makes sense that there is some kind of intelligence guiding the development of life, maybe God, maybe aliens. Or maybe we just don’t know as much as we think we do.
Trey is strictly pragmatic in such matters.
“So I read this story where the Big Bang ran in reverse. The universe explodes into existence, then expands, then rebounds and contracts, shrinking to nothing, then it explodes into existence again.”
Long pause.
“That’s not happening anytime soon, right?”
Finally, I buy the Firefly box set, and Josie and I binge the entire thing. She falls in love with Captain Mal. And Kaylee. And Jayne. And Wash.
And after episode 14, she says, “What’s next?”
“That’s it. After this, they canceled it.”
“And whose fucking idea was it to cancel it?”
Take careful note, Nerd Parent: these are not behaviors you will need to teach! You will see them emerge naturally as your young nerd begins to read and make television choices and learn to learn. If you don’t see them all, worry not; everyone is different, and you’re sure to see most if not all.
Your job is the same as David Morse’s in the movie version of Contact:
“[Ellie Arroway’s] early testing indicated high predisposition towards science and mathematics. Father, Theodore, advised to provide enrichment activities along these lines, did so conscientiously until his death by myocardial infarction November 10, 1974.”
Not that you are destined to die of myocardial infarction, of course; you get the idea: take them to the bookstore often, and teach them to breathe deeply...
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