Re: On nerds and dreamers

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:57:43 -0800, Kris Kowal <cowbertvonmoo@...> wrote:
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> Sender:       Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
> Poster:       Kris Kowal <cowbertvonmoo@...>
> Subject:      Re: On nerds and dreamers
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > On the list of interesting facts that haven't come to light yet,
> > "nerd" is a Greek word meaning "enlightened" (or so I've been told by
> > a Greek person who used to role-play on my MUD), and a "geek"
>
> Before the flames come rollling in, I don't mean to imply anything
> about the etymology of the word "nerd".  Nor can I vouch its accuracy
> since I was, after all, talking to a role player, probably of the
> prepubescent variety.  To be fair, here's a more official etymology a
> friend provided:
>
> "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. Adjective nerdy is from 1978."
> -- http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nerd
>
> Kris Kowal.
Glad you clarified. :) I've discovered that a lot of times when
there's a very convenient, or a very "glorfied" etymology for words
(especially perjoratives), more often than not it's usually a bogus
folk etymology. Sort of like a professor who said "barbarian" came
from the fact that the barbarians wore beards, and in Latin, the word
for beard is "barba", so the Latins called them Barbarians (he glossed
over and ignored me when I corrected him in class.)

Dictionary.com has:

5 entries found for nerd.
nerd also nurd   Audio pronunciation of "nerd" ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (nûrd)
n. Slang

   1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
   2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or
technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

[Perhaps after Nerd, a character in If I Ran the Zoo, by Theodor Seuss
Geisel.]nerdy adj.

    Word History: The word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first
appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: "And then, just to
show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and
a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!" (The nerd is a small
humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester
A. Arthur.) Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957,
issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a regular column
entitled "ABC for SQUARES": "Nerda square, any explanation needed?"
Many of the terms defined in this "ABC" are unmistakable Americanisms,
such as hep, ick, and jazzy, as is the gloss "square," the current
meaning of nerd. The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the
United States in 1970 in Current Slang: "Nurd [sic], someone with
objectionable habits or traits.... An uninteresting person, a 'dud.'"
Authorities disagree on whether the two nerdsDr. Seuss's small
creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mailare the
same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the
identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is
the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd ("comically
unpleasant creature") was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of
1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers,
had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically
obnoxious creature of their own class, a "square."

[Download or Buy Now]
Source: The American Heritage(r) Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition
Copyright (c) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

nurd   Audio pronunciation of "nerd" ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (nûrd)
n. Slang

    Variant of nerd.

[Download or Buy Now]
Source: The American Heritage(r) Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition
Copyright (c) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

nerd

n : an insignificant student who is ridiculed as being affected or
studying excessively [syn: swot, grind, wonk, dweeb]

Source: WordNet (r) 2.0, (c) 2003 Princeton University

nerd

n. 1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone
with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary
social rituals. 2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious
ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really
important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by
trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare the two senses of
computer geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines "And then, just to
show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep
and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!" in the
Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo" (1950). (The spellings `nurd' and
`gnurd' also used to be current at MIT.) How it developed its
mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered
mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the
mid-1960s it meant roughly "annoying misfit" without the connotation
of intelligence).

An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived `nerd' in its
variant form `knurd' from the word `drunk' backwards, but this
bears all the hallmarks of a bogus folk etymology.

Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later,
and some actually wear "Nerd Pride" buttons, only half as a joke.
At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what else?) pocket
protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal.

Source: Jargon File 4.2.0

nerd

NERD: in Acronym Finder

Source: Acronym Finder, (c) 1988-2004 Mountain Data Systems

____

When I was a kid, every weekend my brother and friends and I would
ride our bikes down to the market to buy a candy called "nerds", which
featured these bulbous critters on the box, and came inside a
partitioned box, with a sliding opener, that dispensed two different
flavors, one on each side (like cherry and orange). That's the first
time I'd heard of the word "nerd".

--
Inu payangyara unamey ati tal amariey ka sey, payangyara kria?
Yanaysatra sonataya atan inu jumoey ati atan matawsara jumoey ati.


--
Inu payangyara unamey ati tal amariey ka sey, payangyara kria?
Yanaysatra sonataya atan inu jumoey ati atan matawsara jumoey ati.