The basic definition of nerd is someone who is “an unstylish, unattractive, or
socially inept person; especially [sic] one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic
pursuits” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Merriam-Webster Dictionary cites the
children’s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss (1950) as the earliest written occurrence
(“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 which a nerd is a
fictitious creature, Eglash (2002) reports that the earliest use in its contemporary sense
was cited from student-produced burlesque at Swarthmore College in 1960. The term
was not in common usage until the 1970s, when it became a stock phrase on the
American sitcom Happy Days (2002: 61). Bucholtz (2001) defines nerds as “members
of a stigmatized social category who are stereotypically cast as intellectual
overachievers and social underachievers” (2001: 85). Kendall (2000) cites an online
test (the Nerdity Test) which specifies the characteristics of a nerd: “fascination with
technology, interest in science fiction and related media such as comic books, and
perceived or actual social ineptitude and sartorial disorganization” (2000: 262). The
character of nerd is also stereotypically gender-specific to men, as Kendall (2000)
cites Cockburn (1985: 12), “Technology enters into our sexual identity; femininity is
incompatible with technological competence; to feel technically competent is to feel
manly.” This generally explains why women do not occupy the stereotypical image of
a nerd.
As for geek, Eglash (2002) does not make distinction between this word and nerd.
He uses nerd and geek interchangeably to reduce repetition (2002: 64).
Merriam-Webster Dictionary suggests that geek is: (1) a carnival performer often
billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or
snake; (2) a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked; and (3) an enthusiast
or expert especially in a technological field or activity, i.e. a computer geek. The first
meaning of geek is completely unrelated to the topic concerned here, so it can be
neglected, but the second and the third meaning overlap with the definition of nerd.
The shared meaning between geek and nerd is that they both refer to people who are
intellectually superior but is socially inept, but geek tends to collocate with
“computer”. However, it is not surprising that nerds are superior in the knowledge of
computer science, or any other sub-disciplinary of science, thus it seems that the term
nerd is much more general than geek, and this is the reason why the author of this
thesis chooses the word “nerd” and “nerdy” to refer to the people with such quality in
this work.
Some researches about language and nerds have been done. Bucholtz (1999)
takes a viewpoint of “community of practice” toward the research on language and
identity practices in a community of nerd girls. She defines nerds as people who
oppose “cool” stance, or any other social identity (1999: 211). She cites Eckert (1989),
“If a Jock is the opposite of a Burnout, a nerd is the opposite of both.” Bucholtz also
regards nerds as people who “to a great extent consciously choose and display their
identities through language and other social practices” (1999: 211), and nerds in
American high schools “are not socially isolated misfits, but competent members of a
distinctive and oppositionally defined community of practice” (1999: 211). Bucholtz
(1998) also stated that nerd identity is linguistically indexed through their linguistic
practices on various levels. There are some linguistic practices employed by nerds,
some of them can be categorized as “negative identity practices,” that is, they
establish their nerd identity by not employing certain linguistic features, such as
resistance to colloquial phonological processes such as vowel reduction,
consonant-cluster simplification, and contraction; avoidance of nonstandard syntactic
forms; avoidance of current slang. Other practices can be categorized as “positive
identity practices,” such as employment of superstandard and hypercorrect
phonological forms, adherence to stand and superstandard syntactic forms,
employment of lexical items associated with the formal register (e.g. Greco-Latinate
forms), and orientation to language form.
Bucholtz (2001) continues her research of nerds and proposes that nerds use a
special variety of English, namely “superstandard English.” Standard English in the
U.S. can be seen as “the notion of an idealized prescriptive standard, usually based on
formal written language, and the spoken vernacular believed most closely to
approximate it” (2001: 87-88). However, there are differences between the spoken
Standard English and formal written Standard English. Superstandard English, as
Bucholtz terms the variety of English used by nerds, has following features: “lexical
formality, carefully articulated phonological forms, and prescriptively standard
grammar” (2001: 88). This variety of English surpasses the prescriptive norm
established by the standard, hence the name “superstandard.” Nevertheless,
superstandard English occasionally over-applies the prescriptive grammatical rules
and produces hypercorrect forms, which is extremely marked from the point of view
of the linguistic ideology in the U.S. Bucholtz also notes that superstandard English
“draws on the prescriptive standard, it also contributes to the linguistic ideologies that
elevate one linguistic variety over others” (2001: 88). This ideology is compatible to
the image of the nerds, since they are highly intelligent. In the society where high IQ
is considered an advantage over others, this variety adds the flavor of nerds being in
an elevated position in the society. Bucholtz further argues that superstandard English
is considered to be a racialized style, that is, it is white-exclusive. She points out that
this notion is likewise a work of ideology.
In another research related to nerds, Moore & Podesva (2009) study the style,
indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. They launched an
ethnographical research in a high school in northwest England, and they discovered
that four small social groups of girls in this school have different styles of employing
tag questions, and these tags produced by the girls index to different qualities, since
these four groups have completely different social protocols and attitudes within a
group. One of the four groups is the geek girls. Moore & Podesva conclude that geek
girls use more conservative phonology, and when talking about relationship with boys,
geek girls tend to “offer their opinions and views about hypothetical relationships,
with generic you” (2009: 473). They are more prone to talk with an objective voice,
and sometimes they use tags to demonstrate their knowledge or to show their ability
to engage in a discussion with an authoritative tone. Tags are employed by the geek
girls to establish authority and power onto the addressee; this is an exceptional
phenomenon unique to the group of geek girls.
Eglash (2002) discusses at length on the relations among nerds, race, and gender,
and how the nerd identity has become a “gatekeeper in science and technology
participation” (2002: 49). He cites one previous research done by Turkle (1984):
Turkle (1984) vividly describes nerd self-identity in her ethnographic study of undergraduate men at MIT. In one social event “they flaunt their pimples, their pasty complexions, their knobby knees, their thin, underdeveloped bodies” (196);
in interviews they describe themselves as losers and loners who have given up bodily pleasure in general and sexual relations in particular. But Turkle notes that this physical self-loathing is compensated for by technological mastery.
(Eglash 2002: 49)
From this citation, one can see that being a nerd is not always negative and
undesirable: their social awkwardness and ineptitude are compensated by their
technological mastery. That is to say that nerds are masculine, but different from
traditional masculinity. They may lack the force, power and the violence that
traditional masculinity requires, but they make it up with their knowledge and control
of technology. This aspect of nerds is represented in The Big Bang Theory.