Nerd.

Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org investigates the origins of nerd; there are no firm answers, but it’s fun to see the various theories:

A nerd is a socially inept, often highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field— and otherwise thoroughly conventional person. The slang term makes its appearance in the United States during the early 1950s, but its origin is otherwise mysterious. We simply don’t know where it comes from.

The earliest known use in print is from an article on teen slang in the weekly (physical/paper) news magazine Newsweek from 8 October 1951:

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.

[…] Another early appearance is in a cartoon in Collier’s magazine from 2 February 1952. In the cartoon by John Norment, a radio announcer uses nerd in advertising copy for teen clothing:

You’ll get a large charge from Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. So get on the stick with these real fat, real cool, really crazy clothes. Don’t be a Party-Pooper or a nerd. Yes, everybody is bashing ears about Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. They’re Frampton. They’re pash-pie. They’re Most! […] The geetafrate is reasonable and we’ll make it Chili for you. Remember, don’t be an odd ball. The name is Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes.

We don’t know where nerd comes from, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t hypotheses and speculations about its origin. One of the more plausible, but still probably wrong, ones is that nerd appears as a nonsense name for a strange creature in the 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel). The idea is that this nonsense word wormed its way into teen-age consciousness and was assigned its present meaning there. […]

But this hypothesis is questionable at best. Suess’s nerd has no semantic connection to the slang term. And given that the first print use is in the thoroughly conventional Newsweek a year later, it is likely that nerd had already been in oral use by teens for several years when Suess published this book. It is more likely that Seuss picked a word that he had heard the slang word in use and unconsciously registered it rather than that teens acquired it from his book—a book that most teens in 1950 hadn’t read as it was intended for much younger children. And even more likely is that Seuss’s use of nerd is entirely coincidental.

There are images and further hypotheses at the link; I particularly recommend reading the entire caption for the Norment cartoon which Dave excerpts. It’s pash-pie!

Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer says

    I am struck by the Seussian zoological catalog “an IT-KUTCH / a PREEP / and a PROO / a NERKLE / a NERD / and a SEERSUCKER, too!” on account of the entry “seersucker” being then as now a perfectly well-established English lexeme, even if not standardly used as the name of a weird-looking mammal. It seems unlikely that Seuss would have accidentally coined what he thought was a fictitious word that corresponded with a pre-existing real one here, so why the seeming inconsistency of approach? Maybe he just thought “seersucker” was a comical-sounding word even if non-fictitious, like “Kalamazoo”? Or maybe “seersucker” is less of an outlier in the list because he actually knew that “nerd” was an existing word as well?

  2. They’re Frampton

    I can see Peter Frampton being described as a nerd guitarist, but unfortunately he was only 2 years old in 1952.

  3. A thoroughly conventional odd ball. Square, as it happens.

  4. I have previously mentioned (although not by name) this Frampton. He seemed to be the squarest of squares until he got caught smuggling cocaine for his online “girlfriend.” (After he got fired from the University of North Carolina, he tried to weasel his way into getting an affiliate position our department. We said no.)

  5. Stu Clayton says

    One certainly doesn’t want a morally unreliable, convicted square theoretical physicist as a colleague. What would the Department of Philosophy and Ethics say to that ?

  6. David L. Gold says

    Etymonline suggests “1951, U.S. student slang, probably an alteration of 1940s slang nert “stupid or crazy person,” itself an alteration of nut. The word turns up in a Dr. Seuss book from 1950 (“If I Ran the Zoo”), which may have contributed to its rise,” which is the best proposal I have seen.

  7. To repeat what it says in the post:

    But this hypothesis is questionable at best. Suess’s nerd has no semantic connection to the slang term. And given that the first print use is in the thoroughly conventional Newsweek a year later, it is likely that nerd had already been in oral use by teens for several years when Suess published this book. It is more likely that Seuss picked a word that he had heard the slang word in use and unconsciously registered it rather than that teens acquired it from his book—a book that most teens in 1950 hadn’t read as it was intended for much younger children. And even more likely is that Seuss’s use of nerd is entirely coincidental.

  8. The interjection/predicative adjective nerts (< nuts) goes back to the late 1920s, but I haven’t seen nert. I agree, though, that it’s a very plausible intermediate step.

  9. Owlmirror says

    WikiP:Seersucker: “… originates from the Hindustani words شیر shîr and شکر shakar, literally meaning “milk and sugar”, from the resemblance of its smooth and rough stripes to the smooth texture of milk and the bumpy texture of sugar.”

  10. David L. Gold says

    @LH. The suggestion in Etymonline mentions the Dr. Seuss book only as possibly having stimulated the transformation of nert into nerd whereas the etymology with which you find fault (and I agree is untenable) does not mention nert at all and it attributes too great a role to the mammal’s name in the history of nerd.

    Since the two suggested etymologies are therefore not identical, to “repeat[…] what I said in the post” is not an argument against the one in Etymonline (in which I had no hand, by the way), which has to be evaluated separately.

    It happens that a word, because of its high frequency (here Nerd, the proper noun in the book), can influence any aspect, such as the shape or frequency, of an unrelated word (here the shape of the common noun nert). For example, though niggard and the N-word are etymologically unrelated, the latter has driven the former into obsolescence if not obsoleteness.

    What faults do you find with the etymology suggested as probable in Etymonline?

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    As a nerd myself, it is abundantly clear to me that then word comes from nart

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nart_saga

    I, too, am a semidivine mythological hero. The inference is obvious.

  12. Since the two suggested etymologies are therefore not identical, to “repeat[…] what I said in the post” is not an argument against the one in Etymonline

    Sorry, I read your comment too hastily and didn’t get the “nert” intermediary. I agree that that is a more plausible route, though of course it’s impossible to know for sure.

  13. nert “stupid or crazy” seems semantically distant from nerd “socially inept, often highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field— and otherwise thoroughly conventional”.

  14. David Marjanović says

    seems semantically distant

    Just 15 years ago, nerd was a severe insult which presupposed that socially inept people are stupid or crazy.

    Peer pressure has really lessened very quickly very recently.

  15. ktschwarz says

    Where are the primary sources for “nert”, singular, from the 1940s? Or secondary sources, such as dictionaries of slang from the period? This claim has been passed around for decades without any evidence, and usually without a source; several pages cite etymonline, but Douglas Harper himself doesn’t provide a source.

    All props, then, to John C. Dvorak, who launched the Dr. Seuss theory in PC Magazine in 1987: he dismissed the “nert” theory, but at least he cited a source! It was the Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English (1980):

    nerd (nərd), n. U.S. and Canadian Slang. a foolish and ineffectual person; jerk. … [1965, originally hot-rod and surfing slang, probably an alteration of earlier slang (1940’s) nert stupid or crazy person, itself an alteration of nut] Also spelled NURD.

    This is the earliest, and so far only, evidence that “nert” ever existed. It’s not in Green’s Dictionary, nor Wiktionary, nor any slang dictionary that I’ve seen so far.

    Now, the Barnhart Dictionary gives much more focus to novel science and technology terms than to youth slang. The reference to 1965 and hot-rod slang is probably taken from the Dictionary of American Slang by Wentworth and Flexner (1967 and 1975 editions), which cites a brochure of Hot Rod Jargon from 1965. Between the choices (a) the Barnharts did original research on 1940s-1960s slang and discovered an expression that no other lexicographer ever has found, or (b) they were misremembering the well-known expression “nerts!” and taking a guess… well, with the evidence in hand at present, I’m leaning to (b).

    “Nerts” to “nert” to “nerd” is plausible phonologically, semantically, and chronologically—more so than Dr. Seuss. But for a claim about the 1940s, plausible is not enough. We need evidence! Maybe it’s out there somewhere? Maybe no one has looked in the right place?

    @mollymooly: the sense of “highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field” is a later development, from the 1970s.

  16. So, as Newsweek calls out the slang of Detroit, why specifically Detroit? And what about the origins of “scurve” with which “nerd” is paired there. That might be a productive line of questioning.

    (Yes, “scurve” looks like “scurvy”, but it’s also reminiscent of “skive”.)

  17. But for a claim about the 1940s, plausible is not enough. We need evidence!

    Enthusiastically seconded.

  18. jack morava says

    @ David Eddyshaw : True dat!

  19. David L. Gold says

    @ktschwarz. You are right to question the reliability of secondary sources. Ghost words, ghost meanings, and misetymologies do on occasion acquire lives of their own in such places.

    WorldCat (OCLC) lists not one library holding Tom Medley’s Hot Rod Jargon. A copy is now for sale on eBay (https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1963-tom-medley-hot-rod-jardon-442021925). (I am not the seller nor do I know who that person is.)

  20. As some here may already know, and though I have no dog in this, at the moment, in “Innocuous Linguistic Indecorum: A Semantic Byway,” in Modern Language Notes, Jan. 1949 p 5, Thomas Pyles discussed nuts, “…euphemized to nerts, which fooled nobody….” And suggests a source meaning, in some uses: balls…. [[ So when General Anthony McAuliffe in Dec. 1944 replied to Gen. von Lüttwitz….?]]

  21. This little bi-fold brochure was an insert in the L.P. (large black vinyl disc that played music) aptly named “Hot Rod Rally”, from Capitol Records, produced by Nick Venet in association with Hot Rod magazine. The last photo shows the actual album that the brochure came with, the album is for reference only and is not included in this auction.

    Not something I would expect libraries to carry.

  22. I mean, they might once have carried the L.P. (large black vinyl disc that played music), but even if by some miracle it had survived decades of deaccessioning and attrition, it seems highly unlikely an insert like that would remain in the album.

  23. Speaking of etymologies, is there one for megrim?

    The megrim, megrim sole, whiff, or Cornish sole (Lepidorhombus whiffiagonis) is a species of left-eyed flatfish in the family Scophthalmidae. It is found in the northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea between 100 and 700 m (330 and 2,300 ft) below sea level.[2] It is caught commercially by some countries.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megrim

  24. OED (updated June 2001) says “Origin unknown. Perhaps compare meagre n.² [“Any of several large, predatory, edible fishes of the genera Argyrosomus and Sciaena (family Sciaenidae),” from French maigre].”

  25. J.W. Brewer says

    I am unsure about the meaning of “Frampton” in the 1952 text, other than to note that it seems to have in context a positive valence at odds with the negative-in-context valence of “nerd.” Peter Frampton was certainly not viewed, at least back in the days of his peak commercial success, as “one of us” by music-enthusiast nerds, not least because he displayed the fundamentally non-nerd characteristic of being extremely popular with the young ladies, perhaps at the expense of nerdier guitarist-singers. However, Frampton had already started falling out of favor just before Elvis Costello first offered his wares to the U.S. record-buying public, so there wasn’t quite a head-to-head competition between the two.

  26. My younger brother is always embarrassed when I bring up his short-lived enthusiasm for Frampton Comes Alive.

  27. (I, of course, have always had impeccable taste.)

  28. @hat

    Thank you very much!

  29. Kristian says


    Just 15 years ago, nerd was a severe insult which presupposed that socially inept people are stupid or crazy.

    It fascinates me that this is your impression. I was born in the 80’s and as long as I have been aware, “nerd” has referred to someone who is more likely to be intelligent than unintelligent (at any rate, more intelligent than the “jocks”) and it hasn’t been a severe insult.

    Even Big Bang Theory is almost 15 years old (2007), and the stereotype of the nerd depicted in that (intelligent and socially awkward) is basically the same one I have always been familiar with (although in an extreme form).

  30. John Emerson says

    People started self-identifying as nerds at least 10 years ago and probably 20. The first instance I remember was within a group which met regularly to act out Monty Python skits.

  31. J.W. Brewer says

    I’m not sure if this is a leading or lagging indicator, but “Nerd Pride” was registered as a U.S. trademark in 1996 by … (drumroll) … the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    If you look at the google n-gram viewer, the boom in usage of “nerd” seems to have taken off at the end of the 1970’s, with frequency of usage steadily continuing to increase year-over-year until 2017. Obviously, the semantic scope of the word and how pejorative it is or isn’t perceived as being (and, relatedly, how much it’s used as an endonym v. exonym) may have varied considerably over that time period.

    ETA: the earliest usage of the verbal “nerding out” I found in the google books corpus is from 1980, from Cornell University’s yearbook, in a passage indicating that the Clark Physical Sciences Library featured “hard-core nerding out” in comparison to various other libraries on campus.

  32. John Emerson says

    People who called themselves nerds called people who were TOO nerdy “geeks”.

  33. To follow up on Stephen Goranson’s post, it’d be nice to think that when Gen. McAuliffe wired NUTS he was intending an American equivalent of BOLLOCKS.

  34. David Eddyshaw says
  35. J.W. Brewer says

    FWIW, “frampton” is glossed as “extremely cool” in the “The Fifties” section of a 2003 book entitled “Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-By-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the 20th Century.” No etymology is offered. It also seems to be referenced more contemporaneously in a 1951 Newsweek article about regional teen slang of the day, but snippet view makes it difficult to get context. However, there’s a 2011 Ben Zimmer post on linguistlist, however, that hypothesizes that that 1951 Newsweek article (which also includes “nerd” and “pash-pie” etc.) was heavily relied upon by whoever wrote the caption for the 1952 Collier’s cartoon.

    Of course, one cannot discount the possibility that some mischievous teenage informant told a clueless middle-aged journalist that “we kids all say ‘Frampton’ to describe something that’s extremely cool” even though that was not in fact the case, and the spurious usage then just got passed on from one clueless adult to the next in compendia of mysterious teen slang.

  36. Yes, that’s definitely happened; I vaguely remember posting about one such situation, but I have no way of locating it.

  37. David L. Gold says

    @LH. Whereas most libraries would indeed not be interested in acquiring Tom Medley’s brochure, large English dictionary companies, such as Merriam-Webster and Oxford University Press, which do collect such material, may be, especially because the brochure has additional lexicological material possibly of interest to them.

    Since the Library of Congress has two copies of the recording but its catalog record does not mention the brochure (under “Contents” or anyplace else in the full record), it may not hold it.

    The purpose of my mentioning that WorldCat does not list the brochure was to suggest that it is probably a rarity by now and therefore its current availability on eBay may be a now-or-never moment for whoever or whatever institution might want to acquire it.

  38. Sure, and I hope someone does (and shares it with the world).

  39. Owlmirror says

    J.W. Brewer:

    Of course, one cannot discount the possibility that some mischievous teenage informant told a clueless middle-aged journalist that “we kids all say ‘Frampton’ to describe something that’s extremely cool” even though that was not in fact the case, and the spurious usage then just got passed on from one clueless adult to the next in compendia of mysterious teen slang.

    languagehat:

    Yes, that’s definitely happened; I vaguely remember posting about one such situation, but I have no way of locating it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak

  40. Regarding Hot Rod Rally: Record collectors are every bit as obsessive about rare states and inserts as collectors of incunabula. Regrettably, major libraries don’t collect records, except sometimes classical records. In any case, none of the ten copies currently on discogs indicates having that insert. An shorter version (which does not include nerd) is on the jacket, see, e.g. here:
    https://www.ebay.com/itm/353302850299

  41. Ha, that’s it! It was well before LH, so I didn’t post about it, but it sure was an enjoyable tweaking of the Paper of Record.

  42. @ktschwarz: The sense of nerd meaning “highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field” might not have gotten general purchase until the 1970s, but it was present, at least in nerdier speech communities, by the 1960s or earlier.* By the mid-1960s (at the latest), nerd definitely had the “highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field” meaning at MIT.** There was, however, an MIT tradition (no longer commonplace, but not extinct, by the time I got there in the 1990s) of spelling the word with a silent “g”—as either “gnerd” or “gnurd.” Whether these alternate spellings arose as an attempt to distinguish the word from the more negatively interpreted version found in the broader popular culture, I don’t know.

    @J.W. Brewer: That 1996 trademark registration date is probably around the time time when MIT actually stopped using “nerd pride” prominently in their marketing materials. They were definitely talking about how, “Nerd pride (TM) is only the beginning,” by 1993 or 1994—and that seemed a perfectly normal phrasing at the time.

    * Pace David Marjanović, the even stronger suggestion that nerd was a serious insult, which was only reclaimed within the last couple of decades, is simply wrong, at least in American speech. The term has been in common use as a relatively positive (or at least ironic) in-group signifier from the 1980s at least.

    ** However, that does not mean the word could not also be used negatively, even at MIT. Take, for example, this appearance of “nurdulent” in a 1971 edition of the campus parody publication, The Daily Reamer.

  43. Owlmirror says

    I searching Proquest for occurrences of “nerd” before 1953, I left the begin year empty, and hit on a book from the 1600s, which contained annotations on the Song of Songs. The annotation for 4:13 has the herb spikenard:

    “this is also in the forme plurall Spikenards, or Nards; which is framed of the Hebrew name Nerd, whence the Greeke Nardos, and Latine Nardus is also borrowed”

    See also Strong’s 5373. נֵרְדְּ (nerd), where I note the word is indeed spelled with a tzere rather than a patah or qamatz. Vowel shifts, go figure.

    I post this merely for the curiosity. Only a nerd would be looking in a biblical concordance anyway.

  44. You may have just spawned a whole new false etymology!

  45. There’s a better picture of the Hot Rod brochure here. “Nurd One who is not in the know, a square, not hip”.

  46. I think the grudging rehabilitation of the term started in the early ’80s, with the 1983 candy brand and the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds. I speculate the breakthrough had something to do with the nascent personal computer industry.

  47. Owlmirror says

    So very very very very many OCR errors of “need” → “nerd”.

    *ragequits*

  48. cuchuflete says

    Of no particular importance, but the good Doctor Seuss may have used seersucker as a jocular reference to the then common schoolyard insult yellow bellied sapsucker.
    That was the era of black and white westerns with Gabby Hayes tending the chuck wagon, and the coward with the black hat getting called out with, “Why you yellow bellied…” just before someone shot him.

  49. J.W. Brewer says

    The “nurd” spelling seems much much rarer and I can’t quite figure out if there’s any pattern to who used it in which context in preference to the “nerd” spelling. Corpus data gets skewed by e.g. false positives on NuRD, which apparently is short for Nucleosome Remodeling Deacetylase. Nurds is the title of the second Roches album, which got critical acclaim yet did not sell nearly as well as Frampton Comes Alive. Apart from the variant spelling, it may be interesting as an early-ish (1980) example of a female (which is not to say that the songwriter and the perhaps fictitious first-person narrator of the title track are actually the same woman) self-identifying as a nerd. Although arguably Gilda Radner’s Lisa Loopner character had already struck a blow for gender equity in nerddom.

  50. Other OCR errors are with herd or net. I’m especially partial to “1970 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 Country Gross ? Nerd Gross ? Nerd Gross ? Nerd Grossa Nerd Grossa Nel Gross ?”

  51. Trond Engen says

    A friend in university in the early nineties used nerde v. for what he was doing in robot programming.

    Very different opinions on the dating of the semantic change from derogatory to positive. I suggest somewhere between secondary school and the third year at university.

  52. Trond Engen says

    A friend in university in the early nineties used nerde v. for what he was doing in robot programming.

    No, he didn’t. I misremembered, confused by an earlier discussion, I think. His verb for that was hacke, which I hadn’t really met in Norwegian before and I first misheard as hekke “breed (of birds)”. Positive nerd was all around, and I’m pretty sure the verb nerde was used too, but I can’t pinpoint a first encounter.

  53. David Eddyshaw says

    Proper nerds, of course, still insist on the True Meaning of “hack” (as opposed to the journalistic one.)

    [Posted from a GNU Linux box. Richard Stallman for Galactic Emperor!]

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    Here’s a nice story from a few years ago noting the 25th anniversary of the glorious “Grunge Speak” hoax. https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/8/16615842/grunge-new-york-times-slang

    The story also includes a serious lexicographic claim (which doesn’t mean there aren’t rival claims) that the music-style sense of “grunge” was innovated by Mark Arm, who used it to describe one of his early bands as early as 1981.

  55. >the boom in usage of “nerd” seems to have taken off at the end of the 1970’s,

    The boom in usage of nerd corresponds to the ratings boom for Happy Days. Can’t believe we made it this far and no one mentioned the related word “dren”.

  56. John Cowan says

    I remember watching RotN in a movie theater with my then-new girlfriend (Gale, naturally) and explaining to her that yes, this is how we nerds talk and think, more or less. We agreed that the girls were an unfortunate (and rather insulting) element in the movie, but that unfortunately Hollywood people lacked the imagination to write about female nerds.

    I wonder what I’d think if I saw it now.

  57. Owlmirror says

    A new hypothesis about “nerd”, based on a fortuitous OCR accident.

    1) “Brainerd” is an actual surname, and sometimes personal name. It’s also the name of a town in Minnesota, named after a woman’s maiden name.

    2) In August-September of 1951 (the same year that “nerd” was recorded in a pejorative sense in Detroit, and in Newsweek), a character named “Brainerd” showed up in the popular comic strip “Dick Tracy”.

    3) This strip appeared in newspapers nationwide, and in the Detroit Free Press (where a search for “nerd” brought up “BRAINERD”, along with countless “need”s and “herd”s and other OCR errors, and a couple of other actual instances of “nerd” in October).

    4) The character Brainerd is intellectually arrogant. In the strip for August 28, he proclaims that he is going to kill his sister. His sister responds: “Brainerd, you’re INSANE!” Brainerd: “I, insane? I, professor in the school of medicine at the university?”

    5) [SPOILERS] Despite his intellect, Prof. Brainerd Brown seems less than entirely clever. He rented a vehicle under his own name, which he used to crash into a police car(!) in order to abduct his sister (Crewy Lou, who is under arrest), and he keeps changing his mind about what he wants to do (shoot his sister and dump her body in the river; poison her with cyanide; bury her under the floor of his country house; die with her in a whirlpool down the river, after throwing the oars out of the boat so that they float slowly). Oh, and his motivation is that his sister is a black sheep criminal who is a disgrace to the family, and therefore must be killed for the shame of it all. Yes, he has just committed the crimes of vehicular assault and battery against police in order to carry this out, and is willing to commit another crime of murder against his sister. This is why he decides they both have to die. Anyway, as they float down the river, an encounter with some rapids allows the sister to give him a solid kick to the chin, and he hits his head. We later find out that he has died.

    6) Could some sophomoric wit reading this storyline have snorted at his demise and said: “He sure didn’t have much of a brain, so I guess he’s just a nerd! Ha!”?

    7) Could this same wit have then started using “nerd” as a general insult? Could there also have been a target of bullying with the surname “Brainerd”, that led to a similarly mocking shortening of his name? Searches for “Brainerd” did find other people with that name in the Freep in 1951, so perhaps the Detroit area had more than one family of that name.

    I have no certainty, but I thought I’d mention the speculative notion.

  58. Owlmirror says

    The other hits for “nerd”, I eventually figured out, were from this Detroit Free Press clipping: Soda Fountain Vocabulary is Pretty Cool.

    [Clipped by benzimmer, September of 2020]

    Something that I wondered about was this: This piece was published October 7, 1951. The Newsweek piece, referencing Detroit slang among many others, was published October 8, 1951, one day later. Given lead times, was this reference merely a coincidence, or would a Newsweek reporter (unnamed) have been working with (or even have been!) the Detroit Free Press reporter (Roberta Mackey) on separate local and also national articles on slang?

  59. ktschwarz says

    Craig: “why specifically Detroit?”
    You may be on to something, especially considering what Owlmirror just found—Owlmirror, please do share the actual instances in the Detroit Free Press in 1951! The next known appearance of “nerd” in print (after the cartoon) is from the St. Joseph, Michigan Herald-Press, 23 June 1952, another teen slang story, identified by Douglas Wilson on ADS-L.

    Tom Medley’s “Hot Rod Jargon”: I’ll bet Stuart Flexner had a copy in hand when he was working on his slang dictionary in 1967. What might have become of that copy—and all his note cards—doesn’t bear thinking about… Fortunately, many earlier citations of “nerd”/“nurd” have since been found, so the lexicography doesn’t rest on that one fragile reed. For collections, see Origin of the Nerd (newspapers and cartoons, mostly via Ben Zimmer) and Stack Exchange (fiction, via HDAS, and searches from a college newspaper database).

    Possibly the earliest dictionary to recognize the development of a positive sense of “nerd” was that same Barnhart Dictionary of New English in its third edition (1990), which added definition 2: “U.S. Slang. an enthusiast, fan,” with a quote from the New Yorker in 1980: “… we’re more film nerds than film critics … We’re the sort of people who go to see a film at the Museum of Modern Art and rush to get a seat in the front row.”

    Brett: “By the mid-1960s (at the latest), nerd definitely had the “highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field” meaning at MIT.”
    Plausible, but since that was before you were born, what’s the source?

    JC: “yes, this is how we nerds talk and think”
    I’m surprised; I thought “nerd” could be defined as one who insists that Revenge of the Nerds is a Hollywood distortion, but Real Genius is accurate.

  60. Owlmirror: In favor of “Brainerd”, brain was used in a sense similar to nerd, something like ‘sciencey but awkward’. On the other hand, the earlier sense of nerd seems to have been more like ‘square’.

  61. @Ryan: I don’t know if it was intended as a Happy Days reference or not, but dren was one of the invented profanities on Farscape, used in place of shit. Interestingly dren covered the complete semantic space for shit—used as a generalized expletive, meaning excrement, meaning drugs, etc. The same was true of frell in place of fuck. There were also a few other alien profanities, but their meanings were not as clear, and it one case, the literal referent was apparently something that does not exist of Earth.

    @ktschwarz: My information about the use of nerd at MIT in the 1960s comes primarily from conversations with friends and family who attended or taught at the ‘Tute (as it was known) during that time period, and secondarily from reading a lot of articles in old issues of The Tech and other campus publications. (Obviously, articles about campus life were more informative on this particular question than the hard news stories.)

  62. I do not think I understand the concept without the necessary cultural background (which at the moment seems to include super hero comics and a culture of school bullying).

    But when I was trying to find somethign with necessary combination of connotations, I remembered “bluestocking”. Except that the latter refers to females and I learned about from my grandmother and she in turn was referring to antedeluvial times.

  63. John Emerson says

    This is obviously the right place for discussions of the etymology and history of “nerd”.

    Since 1954 Brainerd has been the home of a 26’ high sitting, talking Paul Bunyan. Its connection with nerditude is left as an exercise for the reader.

  64. John Emerson says

    The nerd concept is part of a democratic cultural anti intellectualism which can cause even smart Americans to pretend to be dumb “regular guys”. I suspect that this is the background Drasvi lacks. When the label came to be voluntarily accepted that may have been a significant cultural change.

    In “Frank Merriwell at Yale” and “Stover at Yale” (early XXc) nerds (students who actually studied) are called “grinds” and are held in utter contempt. In Merriwell the only grind is the treacherous villain, and his studiousness was the culmination of his villainy. And these were the American elite.

  65. The nerd concept is part of a democratic cultural anti intellectualism which can cause even smart Americans to pretend to be dumb “regular guys”
    At least in the context of schools, this isn’t limited to America. In German school novels, the Musterschüler “model pupil” and the Streber “swot / grind” are figures of ridicule or even contempt, who in the course of the plot often get their comeuppance or, more positively, are converted into more laid-back, fun-loving “normal” students.

  66. The awfullest boffins in Reading in the interwar years were at the National Institute for Research in Dairying; nobody wanted to get in a cheesefight with a “nird”.

  67. Kristian says

    I think the “nerd” concept is related to the rise of “youth culture” as distinct from the culture of adults. Teenagers are expected to define themselves as distinct from adults by doing “cool” things. Nerds are a group of teenagers that fail to integrate into this group and so they remain on the margins of their peer groups. This is often because they are often more introverted than average and because they have interests that either more childish (like comics or board games) or more adult (like physics or computers) than the interests that teenagers are expected to have.

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    this isn’t limited to America

    The shapeshifting creep who purports to be First Lord of the Treasury here memorably described his predecessor-but-one as a “girly swot.” Sadly, this was untrue: the predecessor in question was simply another entitled oaf.*

    * “You wait two centuries for the Worst Ever Tory Prime Minister, and then three come along at once!”

  69. John, there are just too many random things said about nerds that do not match anythign from my teenage experience.

    In a thread on a forum about geeks (the word “nerd” also was used) more than one commenter mentioned his school memories about being bullied for [a list of characteristics]. The list included video-games and being awkward with girls. Video-games!??! Everyone plays them here:/

    Or In an article the author speaks about her sister who avoids certain films, musical groups and styles or else she would look like a geek and no one would date her. The author notes that the girl nevertheless is a hardcore fan of a certain sci-fi series and for all purposes is a geek.

    The word here was “geek”, but I am again perplexed a lot. I can not remember a single instance from my teenage years when anyone associated hobbies and styles with unattractiveness for the opposite sex:-/ I am not saying that the phenomenon does not exist – just that I never came across that. Math boys have math girls, punk girls have punk boys.
    Maybe it is this macho component that we are lacking.

    We do have people unpopular with the opposite sex (intelligence is rather attractive) and we have people who are popular but too shy and people who do not udnerstand body langauge. Is a boy unable to notice that a girl likes him a “nerd”? Apparently he is (as a person) but a nerd is supposed to be disliked. This is what I do not see here. Why on Earth?
    Girls are sad when their interest is unnoticed:/
    Boys are ashamed of being virgins in 15 even though it is well below the average age of virginity loss (in your country this age is about 19 I think). They feel compassionate about yet another loser.

    It is reading such things (and having accumulated a number of them) that makes me feel that we just don’t have this “nerd”.

  70. But you have the ботаник.

  71. J.W. Brewer says

    In the age of Dink Stover, the modern heresy that the “elite” should be selected primarily based on SAT scores and studiousness (or, perhaps, that the children of the existing elite should at least visibly go through the motions of trying to attain good SAT scores and demonstrate studiousness) had not yet fully arisen. Of course, within our current “meritocratic” elite, it then turns out that once you make the SAT cut-off, having certain non-nerdy social skills remains a major advantage for the accumulation of wealth and power and whatnot.

    That said, I don’t think nerdiness as a pejorative exonym presupposes book smarts. But self-identified nerds (endonym users) are more likely to want to focus on their own objective superiority on some metric other than the social-adeptness/coolness metrics on which they are falling short, and book smarts is often the most plausible one to hand.

  72. ktschwarz says

    @Owlmirror, sorry, I didn’t refresh the page in time to see that you already provided the details on the Detroit Free Press.

    Spikenards, or Nards; which is framed of the Hebrew name Nerd
    Good one. Mark Liberman provided several screenshots of “nerd” for the perfume plant back in 2011 at Language Log (Nerds, alpha and otherwise, in comments), but none of them were that old. He also found “nerd” as a transliteration of an Arabic word for a game that may have been backgammon, the subject of the Latin treatise Historia nerdiludii.

    @Brett, thanks. I used to read old Techniques and bound volumes of The Tech myself, but don’t recall noticing whether they used “nerd” differently, or at all. Your oral history may be a yet-untapped resource for lexicography.

    The meaning of “nerd” very much depends on a lot of cultural assumptions. There was a series of Language Log posts on translations of “nerd” in Chinese, where Victor Mair thought “But none of these expressions comes close to functioning the way ‘nerd’ does in contemporary American society”: Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2, with many comments on American vs. Chinese culture.

  73. Owlmirror says

    I might as well quote the lines from “Soda Fountain Vocabulary is Pretty Cool”:

    If the person in question (formerly known as a square) is really impossible, he’s probable a “nerd”. Maybe he has his good moments, though, and if he’s not really so bad, he’s probably just a “scurve.”

    Scurve, as you can see, is a less severe form of nerd.

    And a point that I wanted to make to bolster the “Brainerd” hypothesis: The strips of “Dick Tracy” that had him ran just before and at the start of the beginning of the school semester, just in time to affect slang for the school year.

  74. ботаник

    Yes, absolutely. It is what I though a “nerd” is until about 2005 (when I saw super-hero-comics-reading nerd characters in TV series and sitcoms).

    There is no shortage of people 1. interested in (for example) physics, or 2. learning (for example) Japanese because of anime, or 3. awkward with the opposite sex.
    (1) and (3) may combine in the same character. (2) does not imply education: anime is very popular and anime girls are cool. Hardcore interest in it is a highly social activity, as any subculture.

    The difference is in attitudes.

  75. There have always been nerds. Three Men in a Boat:

    There was a boy at our school, we used to call him Sandford and Merton. His real name was Stivvings. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular verbs there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an honour to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a clever man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never knew such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.

    He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and hot-house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn’t let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.

  76. He would have made a good Hatter.

  77. “There have always been nerds”

    An example of an ancient Egyptian nerd would be more nerdy:-E (Note that Archimedes is known for studying his bath rather than physics or comic books…* )


    *
    I was just thinking about those super hero comics. It is another thing that perplexed me: nerds in TV series like them. We do not have this. I think a Russian anime fan can discuss it with her classmates or for anything more advanced go to the Internet. Before the Internet there was USSR and such hobbies spread socially by definition: without people you would not have learned about it.

    By contrast, readers of super hero comics as they are portrayed in TV series are otaku or hikikomori. They are exist between two places: a shop full of comic books, and their rooms, similarly to drug addicts.

    If this image is accurate — I am not sure here — it is a point that a science nerd indeed has in common with comics geek. It is the channel of distribution that is to blame. The shop. It strongly encourages collection but not discussion. It also encourages individual exporation – and in this it is similar to a library (with any books including those for eggheads).

    I do feel that reading books is dumb. My most productive time is when I am lying on my back and fantacizing.

  78. He also found “nerd” as a transliteration of an Arabic word for a game that may have been backgammon, the subject of the Latin treatise Historia nerdiludii.
    That must be the same etymon as Russian nardy “backgammon”.

  79. @ktschwarz: There is also Voodoo, the student humor magazine. Although it was usually, in my opinion, not actually that funny, it was probably the densest source for MIT cultural references. It was not published on a consistent schedule for much of its existence, but it does look like what there is is all (or almost all) online now. I just opened a random issue (January 1962), and it had an illustrated dictionary of MIT terminology. The jokes in the definitions were of different types, such as “the ingestion of useless information” for tooling, versus “a fastener having helical threads and a slotted head” for screw.* That is, there is a mixture of jokey versions of actual definitions and inaccurate definitions where the humor comes from the irony of the reader knowing the actual MIT meaning.

    * This reminded me that “the MIT screw” was falling out if common parlance by the 1990s. Unlike some longstanding bits of Institute jargon, like grease for student (especially Undergraduate Association) leaders, which disappeared completely around that time, “the screw” is protected from complete obsolescence by the continuing existence of the annual Big Screw award. (My freshman year, the Big Screw trophy, most recently won by Information Systems, was hanging up for everyone to see in the main Athena** cluster in the Student Center.) However, other mentions of “the screw” were becoming uncommon. The classic “IHTFP” T-shirt, showing a giant wood screw halfway into the Great Dome, was still on sale in the late 1990s, but I think I only knew one person who had one.

    ** MIT’s campus computer network, run on a heavily customized UNIX-based networking setup. The most notable piece of the software that was developed in house was the security protocol, called (continuing the use of mythological Greek names) “Kerberos.”

  80. David Eddyshaw says

    He also found “nerd” as a transliteration of an Arabic word for a game that may have been backgammon, the subject of the Latin treatise Historia nerdiludii.

    R C Bell’s* excellent Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations** has this as the (Arabic) ancestor of Backgammon, under the name nard; he suggests it actually originated in southwest Asia or Iran. He also mentions a “nerdshir”, apparently found in the Gemara, which Nathan ben Jehiel

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_ben_Jehiel

    suggested might be the same game.

    * He was a surgeon:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Charles_Bell

    ** The perfect gift for board game nerds.

  81. David L. Gold says

    Hebrew-Aramaic נרדשיר (nardeshir) ‘some form of backgammon’ comes from Persian نردشیر‬ ‘idem’ (https://www.ancientgames.org/nard-original-backgammon/). According to that website, the first mention of any form of the game by that name or a similar one is in the Tractate of Ketubot of the Babylonian Talmud (https://www.sefaria.org/Ketubot.61b?lang=bi), where it occurs as נדרשיר (nadreshir). The final redaction of the Babylonian Talmud occurred about 600 CE.

    Since the URLs for pages in a book do not always take you to the right page, search for nadrashir (sic) if you click the one to the Tractate of Ketubot and do not see the word immediately.

  82. David Eddyshaw says

    Thanks!

  83. Correction: read “…where it occurs as nadrashir.”

  84. David Eddyshaw says

    In further validation of Nerd Pride (superfluous though it be in these more enlightened times), I feel impelled to mention that the Welsh nerth means “strength, power.”

  85. Hai Gaon’s Responsa say that “The meaning of nardeshir […] those who play with little stones” and “[…] in nardeshir will not come to boredom.” These are from the Genizah, hence the gaps.

  86. The greatest of them all is self-styled genuine nerd Toby Radloff, who was made famous through Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor comic and subsequent movie. There are lots of Toby Radloff videos, and even a full-length documentary. To someone who is better than me with midwestern accents, what’s his speech like? Is it just an accent unfamiliar to me (he’s lived in Cleveland all his life), or also an idiosyncratic style of talking?

  87. I think a “botanik” is Шурик. But I think the word was not in use. Очкарик was.

  88. Dmitry Pruss says

    When was this ботаник thing? Never heard anything of the sort. The slurs may have been ethnic, and the unpopularity with the girls, related to parents’ lack of elite status, but they aren’t the same dimensions. We had a distant equivalent of jocks in my school, a semi closed and proudly masculine circle, but they were o-runners, a decidedly nerdy form of a sport.

  89. Dmitry, I think 90s. It could have existed earlier, I just did not hear it.

    Then I heard б`отан. And since at least early 2000s ботать (“заниматься” in the contex of studying) became common, at least among math students. Ботан looks pretty much like an agent noun from ботать, given the stress. But as I heard it earlier, I interpreted it as a shortened ботаник and ботать as ботан-работать hybrid. The sequence could easily be the opposite.

  90. PlasticPaddy says

    @de
    Ní neart go cur le chéile = no strength without unity

  91. Ботаник, или нерд, — школьник или студент, занимающийся учёбой в ущерб личной жизни.

  92. From Terekhov’s Каменный мост (1997-2008): “Но Рузвельт, но этот слепец, ботаник, прямодушный, блаженный душегуб, в мае 1942-го решил поговорить с русскими.”

  93. Владимир Тучков. Смерть приходит по Интернету // «Новый Мир», 1998: “Дядя сказал, что эта туфта и лажа для ботаников.” [GT: Uncle said that this bullshit is crap for nerds.]

    Галина Щербакова. Loveстория (1996): “Но она хлопнула дверью и нашла какого-то ботаника, невостребованного историей и женщиной.”

  94. Hans mentioned “grind”. We have зубрила, from зубрить “to grind, to learn by memorization” and my favorite suffix -ila. I know this word from books – I do not remember schoolchildren ever calling anyone so.

    Hans spoke about literature too:

    In German school novels, the Musterschüler “model pupil” and the Streber “swot / grind” are figures of ridicule or even contempt, who in the course of the plot often get their comeuppance or, more positively, are converted into more laid-back, fun-loving “normal” students.

    Зубрила can originally be a school word, just old, but it just occured to me that adults could be the medium where ботаник was both disseminated and used. It was not a part of my school’s dialect. I heard it from boys (rarely) and I read it too (rarely). Later I began to hear бóтан.

  95. There is also Voodoo, the student humor magazine..

    The Whole Gnurd Catalog, from when I was an undergrad, is pretty sophomoric all right. (Some of my housemates were Thursday people.)

    And parochial: there are two pages of calculator jokes. George Wharton James’s Indian Blankets and Their Makers becomes Indian Calculator Covers and Their Makers, by Edith Wharton ___. Like all college humorists of that day, having run out of steam, they rip off Monty Python: Blancmange.

    Noam Chomsky (or his publisher) took out an ad for his then latest book.

  96. Hans spoke about literature too
    While Streber was certainly old by then – I’ve seen it in literature from the 1920s, and I assume it’s older than that – it was still a slur in my school days in the 1970s / early 80s. So it hadn’t become a purely literary word, or the kind of out-dated youth slang that continues to be used by adults who don’t have a clue. Don’t know whether it’s still used by pupils nowadays.

  97. Зубрила can originally be a school word, just old, but it just occured to me that adults could be the medium where ботаник was both disseminated and used. It was not a part of my school’s dialect.

    Yes, for what it’s worth I don’t think of it as schoolboy slang but more parallel to the earlier физики/лирики (in usage group, not meaning).

  98. I do not remember schoolchildren ever calling anyone so. – a clarification: kids read books. I did. I knew the word since elementary school. But when kids were insulting each other, it was not the word of choice. It does not mean that they never used it: very likely some did.

    And about “adults do not have a clue” – I did not see the world this way.

    There are strange words kids in books use. These kids can be Swedish. Or Norwegian. Or if it were today, Japanese (those are very strange).

    And there are strange words kids around me use.

  99. ботаник was an ordinary word for a student with their nose always in a book in my undergrad days (early 90s). But I’ve learned it only after moving to Moscow. As for clumsiness with the fair sex, I am not sure. A boy can study a lot and be good with girls, no? There also was a verb ботанить = to study, which we used without any whiff of denigration.

  100. Oh, thank you! I only heard it later in the form “ботать”, it is the first time I hear ботанить. It is extremely interesting.

    Clumsiness with the opposite sex is here because I saw people describing “nerds” as both awkward with it and disliked by it and even laughed at by the same sex for it (that is, eventually, bullied). I do not know how representative is this description of the idea behind nerds. I think in this thread people said something differnent: “socially inept”.
    I contrasted a Russian botanik to it in that one is not supposed to be disliked by anyone, the opposite sex in particular. One can be awkward with it … or not.

  101. Allan from Iowa says

    The “Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English” refers to surfing slang, and to go along with that, I recall Sally Field using the term once in the 1960s tv series “Gidget”.

    When I was in college in the 1970s my classmates and I sometimes spelled it “knurd” just for fun. At this time the word meant a person who was annoying in a goofy way. In the 1980s I was surprised when someone informed me of the positive meaning — a nerd was someone who could fix your computer.

  102. ktschwarz says

    And the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang cites “He was a real nurd” from Gidget Goes Hawaiian (novelization, 1961). That’s probably why the Barnhart editors assumed it was “originally hot-rod and surfing slang”: those were the only sources they happened to find. They didn’t have the Internet to help them search old newspapers, especially college newspapers, which show that it was widespread. The Gidget writers were probably using it because the characters were teenagers, not because they were surfers.

  103. John Emerson says

    The scriptwriter for Gidget modeled the title character on a real person, his own daughter, who was still alive a few years ago and gave a cheerful interview about her Gidget experience, which seems to have been entirely positive.

    The topless preteen on the Blind Faith record jacket which was withdrawn from circulation likewise gave a cheerful interview about her experience awhile back.

  104. John Emerson says

    When I first heard the word turd I assumed it would be written tird, by analogy with the common word bird, while when I first heard the word nerd I assumed it would be spelled turd, also by analogy. I propose a normalization to bird tird bird.

  105. January First-of-May says

    What does Regularized Inglish do with the bird/turd/nerd triple? They really do seem to rhyme with each other, but I’m not sure if this equivalence is, in fact, regular.

  106. John Emerson says

    “be spelled nurd”

  107. J.W. Brewer says

    Jan. 5/1: For most of us Americans that’s probably an instance of the “fern–fir–fur merger,” a/k/a the NURSE merger because all three of those F-words now have the NURSE vowel. There are other Englishes where those three words have distinct vowels, and it might be the case that the three you mention would likewise diverge, although since nerd/nurd would be a recent borrowing from AmEng it might not end up the same way as if it had been a leftover that the relevant dialect had inherited straight from Chaucer.

  108. Note that turd, being a word that is much more likely to be encountered in speech than writing, has acquired the widely accepted alternate spelling “terd.” It looks like examples of the “terd” spelling date to the nineteenth century; that spelling probably can’t be that much older, since the etymological vowel, still present in early Modern English, was /ʊ/.

  109. David Eddyshaw says

    I rhyme nerd with bird rather than herd, which have different vowels for me. I must have adopted the word from a different dialect. This actually makes sense, as there have never been any nerds in Glasgow, of course (though there are neds.)

    What about you, Jen-fae-Embro?

  110. How, phonetically? Are they rhotic?

  111. David Eddyshaw says

    /nɪrd/ and /hɛrd/, more or less. I do indeed rhote.

  112. “This actually makes sense, as there have never been any nerds in Glasgow, of course (though there are neds.)
    What about you, Jen-fae-Embro?”

    I wanted to mention a nerd from Glasgow (more: a role model!) yesterday. I did not, because people have already assigned a label and it sounds differently. He is not a Glaswegian but you said “have never been in Glasgow”.
    Paganel. Jacques Paganel. Jacques Eliacin François Marie Paganel.

  113. DE: and third?

  114. David Eddyshaw says

    Glasgow has nerdlike persons, referred to in the local language as /tun kunslərz/.*

    *I stole this from Stanley Baxter’s Parliamo Glasgow

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfR_ObBQ5js

    /ara para tun kunslərz/ “There are two intellectuals.”

  115. Languagehat, thank you:) It was not a secret – it was inspired by something that I wrote here. But it was unfinished and obscene:( And I could not delete it because I posted it with VPN on, and in this browser I can’t edit comments sent with VPN plug-in on.

  116. i think the focus on the “smart but socially hopeless” definition is leading a lot of this speculating down a blind alley. that’s been the dominant meaning since at least the 1980s (i wouldn’t be surprised if MIT in the 1960s was a key piece of how that came to be, since that school has such a strong history as a slang generator). but the variant spellings that have been mentioned from the 1960s/70s seem to point to a need to mark this meaning as new, as “nerd, but not nerd as you understand it”.

    and that makes sense, because the oldest documented meanings are different. they’re all about being “square”. which is useful, because that connects it not just to youth culture, but more specifically to “hip” youth culture – a word from the kids who considered themselves cool and up to date. since that’s a social space where the slang changes quickly, i think the detroit/AP citation is likely quite early in the word’s usage. and to me, the double citation seems like clear evidence that the AP piece was by the detroit writer – the phrasing is exactly the hedge you’d use if you weren’t certain a word you know from hearing it used is strictly local or not.

    so i think the place to look is in detroit and its youth cultures of the late 40s/early 50s – when the motor city was a nascent center of youth culture coolness, after all! i wouldn’t be surprised if there were a relationship to earlier “nerts” and “nert” – especially if those were present in black musical circles, which is my guess at where the word really comes from.

  117. o!
    and looking at the dr. seuss page, i think he is specifically invoking current slang. the “nerd” is a rather grinch-y square. and the seersucker also looks to me like a double entendre aimed at parents reading out loud: an obviously clean “real word” rubbing up against either a pansy (as the flowers could hint) or exactly the kind of ingenue who figures in blowjob jokes.

    and i would bet that arnold zwicky has never been part of a subculture whose slang became widely popular. if he had, he’d know that there’s always a specific source. if there weren’t, no one could have come up with it, and no one would’ve thought it was funny or evocative enough to adopt it! i’d bet on mortimer snerd way before i’d bet on zwicky’s ‘no real source’. but maybe he’s just a chomskyite who thinks slang gets spontaneously generative-grammared into existence without human intervention. i didn’t google to find out.

  118. Stu Clayton says

    a chomskyite who thinks slang gets spontaneously generative-grammared into existence without human intervention

    Gosh, what do chomskyites have to say about slang ? Do they dismiss it as an ape-y phenomenon ? Or do EEGs light up in the appropriate places when the appropriate module is stimulated ?

  119. I think rozele is right about the changing meanings of the werd/wird/wurd. And for those who might wonder about

    Languagehat, thank you:)

    …drasvi asked me to delete some wordage and I obliged, being the obliging fellow I am.

  120. Owlmirror says

    Hm; there would have been a problem with Roberta Mackey having also been the Newsweek reporter. It’s hard to remember sometimes that businesses and other institutions could have sexist, racist, and/or anti-semitic policies for hiring or membership, but in 1951, they could, and all too often, did.

    WikiP:

    In 1970, Eleanor Holmes Norton represented sixty female employees of Newsweek who had filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Newsweek had a policy of only allowing men to be reporters. The women won, and Newsweek agreed to allow women to be reporters. The day the claim was filed, Newsweek’s cover article was “Women in Revolt”, covering the feminist movement; the article was written by a woman who had been hired on a freelance basis since there were no female reporters at the magazine.

    So the only other option that makes sense is some sort of cooperation between Mackey and the Newsweek reporter.

    The masthead for the 1951-10-08 issue does show some women were among the editorial staff, for whatever that’s worth. And I see that there was also a bureau for Detroit.

  121. David L. Gold says

    @Owlmirror. “So the only other option that makes sense is some sort of cooperation between Mackey and the Newsweek reporter.”

    The probable solution to the puzzle is that the story (in the newspaper sense of that word) was written by a reporter for the Associated Press or United Press International, which released it to the newspapers subscribing to its services, which were then free to publish it.

    You can see that today on the Internet too: you read a story on one news medium’s website and then you see the same or almost the same text on another’s website.

  122. John Cowan says

    I thought “nerd” could be defined as one who insists that Revenge of the Nerds is a Hollywood distortion, but Real Genius is accurate.

    Sure, it’s a Hollywood distortion, but it’s a distortion of a real phenomenon, heightened humoris causa. Nevertheless, it’s sympathetic humor, not mockery: the nerds in RotN really are the underdog heroes. The redemption of the word as a positive endonym is parallel to that of queer (and black, for that matter).

    Paul Graham on nerds is excellent on why nerds aren’t socially successful in U.S. secondary schools. In school, family and studies are treated as background activities, and what really matters is where you are on the popularity hierarchy: he compares it to a prison, a royal court, and elsewhere to a harem. Nerds are playing a different game, and it’s too hard to work intensively on both learning and popularity (though my class valedictorian was also the captain of the football team, a feat akin to juggling torches as far as I am concerned).

    The same effects also account for why nerds aren’t attractive to girls: for a girl to be a nerd’s publicly recognized girlfriend would be a massive hit to her in the popularity contest, as unpopularity and (less so) popularity are contagious. Nerds of both sexes of course internalize these values, which is why they don’t pair up: each is convinced of their sexual and social worthlessness, reinforced by whatever degree of introversion they have.

    (I define extraverts as people who are charged up by social contact, whereas introverts are worn down by it. Introverts often enjoy socializing, but prefer small quiet groups to large noisy ones, and eventually need a period of solitary activity to recover. One of the keys to the longevity of my marriage is that Gale and I, contrary to all previous experience, prefer each other’s company to solitude — something extraverts have trouble even understanding as a special case: doesn’t everyone prefer company of any sort to “dreadful solitude”? Well….)

    The thing that partially changed the status of nerds is not any sort of public enlightenment, but the fact that suddenly nerds were seen to acquire money (people with money are always popular in America modulo some particular bad actors) even as teenagers or young adults. That produced the phenomenon of pseudo-nerds, people who got into computers not because they loved them, but purely for the money or the status. (Woz is a nerd, Jobs was a pseudo-nerd.) Perpetual naif as I am, I was startled for a long time when I ran into such people professionally; now I more or less shrug.

    What does Regularized Inglish do with the bird/turd/nerd triple?

    It leaves it alone, and accepts that there is a third pronunciation for /er~ir~ur/ along with the short + /r/ and the long + /r/ cases (some of which are merged away in AmE, though not in my AmE except for hurry/furry). The other /Vr/ vowels have only the two pronunciations, except for non-NORTH-FORCE mergerers.

  123. David Eddyshaw says

    Jobs was a pseudo-nerd

    Very true.

    The Economist yet again proved its status as a paper for people who actually care to understand things in the fact that in October 2011, when Jobs died, it somewhat pointedly (I think) ran, instead of an obituary of Jobs, a joint obituary of Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy, who were in real life what the ignorant imagined Jobs to have been.

  124. A memorable conversation with a very outspoken professor at my school, when I asked him about some grad schools I was considering going to: “You could go to [famous Ivy League university], but they are all nerds.”

    I didn’t ask him what he meant, and I didn’t go there. I think he meant they were competent but unimaginative.

  125. ktschwarz says

    rozele: the oldest documented meanings are different. they’re all about being “square”.
    Yes. The Stack Exchange page linked above quotes a scene from Where the Boys Are (1960, basis for the successful spring-break movie), where a boy declines to have sex with a girl because she’s a virgin: “Malcolm was a real nurd. In the end he said he was saving himself for marriage, and broke it up by leaving.” That has nothing to do with intelligence or obsessiveness or even unattractiveness—she’s pursuing him!—it means only “square”. (The author was a college English instructor at Michigan State University, so he probably heard slang from his students.)

    the detroit/AP citation is likely quite early in the word’s usage.
    Newsweek, not AP. If it had been a syndicate story, then it should have been found in multiple places by now, considering how many lexicographers have been looking and how many newspapers have been digitized. I think you’re right about this being early, since the reporter describes “nerd” and “scurve” as replacing earlier “drip” and “square”.

    i wouldn’t be surprised if there were a relationship to earlier “nerts” and “nert”
    “Nert”, singular noun, is a ghost word until someone brings evidence. The dictionaries that use primary sources—OED, HDAS, Green’s—don’t even consider this derivation worth mentioning.

    the “nerd” is a rather grinch-y square.
    You’re kidding—it has big bushy hair and looks like a hippie, except for the scowl. (Of course, most Dr. Seuss characters have bushy hair, feathers, or whatever.)

    i would bet that arnold zwicky has never been part of a subculture whose slang became widely popular
    I would bet that you’ve never read his blog. Check out the “slang” category there. Copious notes on gay slang, some of which went mainstream.

    maybe he’s just a chomskyite
    Zwicky did get his degree from MIT, but he’s described himself as an “early apostate” of Chomsky; he has very little to say about him and none of it admiring. About the most he’s said is

    My own intuition, shared by a small sampling of linguist colleagues I’ve consulted, is that it’s inappropriate to refer to Chomsky as a linguist’s linguist — though no doubt you’d disagree with that judgment if you were one of what Jakobson once called (in my hearing) Chomsky’s epigones. For many of us, Chomsky is the world’s linguist, painting in big bold strokes, not a meticulous scholar of breadth and depth. (blog)

    I like Mortimer Snerd the best so far: it fits chronologically, since teenagers in 1951 could have seen Edgar Bergen as children. But no evidence has yet been found for any intermediate steps, e.g. childish reanalysis as “mortimer’s nerd” or “mortimer nerd”. (If Proto-Indo-European can have an s-mobile, why not English?)

  126. David Eddyshaw says

    Talking of John McCarthy incidentally reminded me of this excellent motivational poster:

    https://www.xach.com/img/doing-it-wrong.jpg

  127. Chomsky lards his linguistics with politics. Zwicky lards his linguistics blog with naked man photos.

  128. David Eddyshaw says

    Well, after all, ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον. Naked ones too.

  129. and what really matters is where you are on the popularity hierarchy

    In Russian schools children are divided in groups (“classes”) whcih attend all lessons together. In 5th grade I was a member of 5b, and we would move from the history room (also called a “class”) to math room and so on.

    5 “a” was another “class”, that is, another group of kids that I for some reason left. I changed school and they first placed me in “a”, and then to “b” class. “a” were mostly children from the neighbourhood. Many in “b” class, in turn, were children of teachers and former graduates. In Soviet times it was a rather dissident school (this is why it attracted children of former graduates), there even was a red banner with white English letters “all you need is love” over the entrance. Later it became an elite school, I am afraid.

    In the “a” class studied my (local) friend and a girl who I liked and who liked me. Since then we… hm. Exchanged looks. Together the two classes (5 “a” and 5 “b”) were called “a parallel”. This parallel would become 6 “a” and 6 “b” a year later. As this school is running so called mathematical classes, later “в”, “г” and “д” classes were added.

    I have no slightest idea who was popular where. Never “popularity” was defined. My class was rather fragmented. Say, two girls occupied a desk behind me and sometimes threw things at me or otherwise annoyed me. I do not remember them communicating with anyone else:/
    Another class a few years younger than mine – I think parents of kids in that class were freinds, and kids knew each other – were famously all freinds. They are still friends, still meet at parties, most of them became journalists and often work together.
    But relationships are individual: this boy is my friend. Those girls do not like me. Or maybe like me, I do not know.

    Then I moved to a math class and again, I do not see a place for “popularity” there. I also never heard about it from my freinds who studied in other schools.

    Now, is there a principal difference between how our school space is organized and how it happens in various English-speaking countries? Particularly somethign that leaves more place for “popularity”?

  130. Prototypically a Russian “class” is just 30 kids who are together sicne they are 7 until they are 17… They usually don’t really know people from other classes.

  131. Another detail: my first “district” school, next to my house, it is not a good school.

    I only attended elementary school there and and my class was considered the worst one around. A collection of all sorts of “bad boys” and struggling kids. When I left the class they disbanded it because it was too problematic. I was, meanwhile your ideal nerd (just 6).

    I discovered that school is a mildly depressive place, and since then was just reading science fiction under my deck and hardly socialized (it was different “in my yard” as we say here, that is in my appartment block’s yard, on the street). And .. local “bad boys” felt rather protective towards me.

  132. In 1970, Eleanor Holmes Norton represented sixty female employees of Newsweek…

    And today is her 84th birthday. She’s currently the District of Columbia’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, working to make DC the 51st state.

  133. John Cowan says

    xach.com

    Zachary P. “Xach” Beane is the person who keeps track of just about all the open-source Common Lisp libraries in the world, tests them, and makes them available for automated download and installation. I only wish Scheme had anyone with one-tenth his energy. (And I say this despite how rude he was to me on IRC when I first joined freenode@#lisp, now known as libera.chat#commonlisp, where you can often find me.)

    It’s wholly unsurprising that he has a motivational poster of John McCarthy (qua inventor and founder of Lisp).

  134. @ktschwarz:

    thanks for the clarifications & corrections!

    and you bet right! but now i’m looking forward to giving zwicky’s blog at least a glance – though i stand by my disparagement of ‘no real source’ spontaneous slang-generation.

    But no evidence has yet been found for any intermediate steps, e.g. childish reanalysis as “mortimer’s nerd” or “mortimer nerd”.

    i’m not sure that it would take that kind of intermediate step. i’d think the first step in slangification would be to drop half the name (i suppose i’m glad not to be in the timeline where “nerds” are “mortys”, though it would be a nice posthumous dig at baron roger*).

    what i’d hypothesize is an (admittedly just-so-story) sequence that starts with someone saying “what a Snerd”, followed first by their social circle adopting “snerd”, and then other folks unaware of the reference absorbing it but dropping the “s” (to normalize the unusual initial sequence of “snerd”**)…

    grinch-y square / big bushy hair and looks like a hippie, except for the scowl

    to continue splitting hairs a little:

    i just don’t see the hippie in that sourpuss. seuss’ Nerd’s body language is as square as it gets, it’s the only creature on the page wearing clothes, and its disapproving look is directed at the Seersucker in just the way you’d expect a square to look at something so epicene and pansy-wreathed.

    i can understand reading the fluffy sideburns as hip in a beatnik way (hippies proper haven’t been invented yet in 1950, but hipness sure has), but seuss was old enough for them to be the outdated facial hair of 2 generations back, not the scandalous facial hair of 1.5 generations down.

    the red domino mask, though, is definitely on the hip side of the line.


    * i know, i know, he died an earl, but i hold a grudge on piers gaveston’s behalf.

    ** the reverse of the way “snek” is based on shifting the vowel to make an unusual sequence.

  135. @rozele:

    i would bet that arnold zwicky has never been part of a subculture whose slang became widely popular

    Zwicky is a gay man, and a vocal member of the leather subculture, so we can take for granted that both as a community member and as a scholar he’s familiar with in-group slang being widely appropriated.

    Not all cultures can trace their language to specific individual sources, and there are often good reasons for that. The WW2 veterans who came up with the gay leather lexicon were probably very keen on preserving their anonymity (and that of any other members of the subculture they knew), so it’s quite unlikely we’ll ever trace the originator of fisting, watersports or service top.

  136. J.W. Brewer says

    Perhaps the chain of events ought to go the other way. Can someone call up whatever shadowy behind-the-scenes politburo is in charge of Cockney rhyming slang and encourage them to promote “Mortimer Snerd” for “nerd,” with “mortimer” as the obvious clipped version (which loses the rhyme and thus requires more insider knowledge to grok)?

  137. J.W. Brewer says

    With regard to “ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον. Naked ones too,” I regret to inform our resident learned Calvinist that America’s most Calvinistically-named institute of higher learning is gutting the teaching of Greek (and, according to subsequent news stories, other learned and God-pleasing languages like Latin, German, and even Dutch). Note the fateful sentences “Pre-seminarians at Calvin have historically made up a large percentage of Greek and Latin students. But when Calvin Theological Seminary decided to stop requiring Greek as an admissions prerequisite, enrollment of pre-seminarians in Greek classes dropped.”

    https://calvinchimes.org/2021/04/15/no-greek-courses-to-be-offered-for-first-time-in-150-years/

  138. Truly the world declines to iniquity.

  139. David Eddyshaw says

    Some are simply predestined never to learn Greek.

  140. John Cowan says

    I, even I. As a teenage nerd, I tried to teach myself Homeric Greek, but failed utterly.

    ======

    I’d like to revive the discussion, focusing on the phrase “otherwise thoroughly conventional person”. I knew there were nerds who wore suits and ties (stereotypically they worked for IBM), but by the time I actually met a nerd who actually worked for IBM he was quite interchangeable with other nerds: that is to say, oddballs.

  141. John Cowan says

    Oh, and the person the “guilty Tsar Boris” publicly referred to as a girly swot was Corbyn, not Cameron, per various sources from the FT to the Graun. This epithet has now been reclaimed by the young intellectual women of the UK.

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