Ok, so. Geek? Nerd?

[elionwyr]

What exactly is the difference?

(Yes, yes, I could just wikipedia it, but...I'm curious what y'all think.)

It seems to me that geek is more socially acceptable than nerd*. I mean, when I think "nerd" I think "Revenge of the Nerds" and pocket protectors; and when I think geek I think of many of my friends, none of whom wear pocket protectors.

What say you?



* Unless we're talking that X-Files episode, in which case, dude, I am SO not interested in continuing this discussion. shudder

Comments

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

in my idiolect, "geek" is someone who is focused on/obsessed by/fascinated by a certain thing, is aware of that focus/obsession/fascination, and has enough self-awareness to find it sometimes amusing. I hang out with cocktail geeks, music geeks, comic book geeks, movie geeks... actually, I tend to hang out with geeks.

Hmmmm... I don't use "nerd," often, but it has derogatory connotations to me. "Humorless," and "oblivious," perhaps, being the main ones.

I also think there's a sliding scale of good geeks to bad geeks, and nerds are not in it. A nerd is more likely to be quietly off being obsessed about, say, the first two October Project albums; a bad geek will leap into a music conversation about them and explain in detail why the third cut on the first album is the absolute pinnacle of twentieth-century female vocals, not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise; a good geek will talk about the albums, and how they relate to Mary Fahl's later solo work, the November Project, and other things, and engage in actual conversation.

[just-the-ash.livejournal.com]

Your idiolect maps to mine. I'm a literature geek, and yesterday I told my two sections of freshman comp about how National Punctuation Day (seriously, www.nationalpunctuationday.com) proved people out there were geekier about punctuation than I was. (No joke: you can download an official meatloaf recipe for NPD, and use it to bake, say, question-mark-shaped meatloaves, as held by the woman in the photo.)

But geekeries can overlap socially, and be picked up by other strands of culture. Moby-Dick has found his way into a tabletop miniatures game (wargaming geeks!), and into an entire album, Leviathan, by death-metal band Mastodon. (I admit the "Blood and Thunder" video confuses me. I get the "WHITE WHALE! HOLY GRAIL!" in the chorus, but I must have missed the chapter in the original about clowns, bearded strippers, and popcorn.)

Also, yes, the humor. Penny Arcade is a beautiful spoof of geekery -- Looking for Guild misses the mark because all the humor is in-jokey, and the plot is all SRS BZNS. The icon attached to this comment is a lit-geek-humor thang, and it's almost frightening how good Emily looks in Aretha's hat.

Your bad-geek example is almost certainly committing one or more of the Geek Social Fallacies, the very existence of which also points to a level of self-awareness not implied by "nerd."