And yet, the majority of articles written about the show at the time or since then talks about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer made being a nerd (and being smart, doing research to defeat demons, adept with computers, etc.) cool.

A sloppy test of what is popular and current thought was introduced to me not too long ago by a certain favorite author of mine, who happens to be very close friends with a certain singer who in 1994 said the following:
"I'm the Queen of the nerds. I love nerds- by which I mean, not a cool, bitchin' person. I guess I was a cool nerd. I wasn't shuffling my feet in the corner of the playground, I was the homecoming queen, but then, all the nerds voted for me."

Neil's admittedly sloppy Google comparison of what works and what doesn't is a good gauge of popular opinion, how much one agrees with it or not. The measurement is based on how many hits a particular search turns up in Google. Like if you wanted to look up "Glenn Beck is a great guy" vs. "Glenn Beck is a jerk". The former turns up 7 hits; the latter turns up 68,700 hits.

It's not strictly scientific, but it does give you at least a general idea of how people feel. (By the way, using the Google test, I've never seen a more lopsided result than the example I just thought of five minutes ago and used above. Wow. That guy needs to get hit by something. Usually I just use it for checking spelling errors.

So using this same test, I tried the following:
"willow geek cool buffy" (39,200 hits)
vs
"willow nerd cool buffy" (1,530,000 hits)


And there you go.