Collegiate "geek" in the '70s (was Re: Synonymy avoidance)

[Paul Johnston]

I feel like one of these informants in the Survey of Irish Dialects who
hadn't actually spoken Irish in 70 years, but were the last who had in their
area, but I can try to recapture the '70s definition in University of
Michigan Quaddie language, circa '70:

GEEK we didn't use much, but the frat crowd did (sometimes of people like
us)--it really was still rather close to the carnie definition, in that a
geek was someone who was definitely weird and gross with it.  We had a guy
in our college who didn't wash or change his sheets for six months, and
excelled at grossing out people in other (sometimes quite creative) ways
too--he would be a geek.

NERD/NURD wasn't a techie, as now, or someone who studied all the time;
quite the opposite, in some ways.  It denoted a person who was kind of dumb
and "out of it", but that was the way they were, they couldn't help it.  I
remember entitling a certain President who had gone to U of M "Gerry Nerd"
because of the facility he had for falling out of plane exits, not because
of his intelligence.

DORK was different.  A dork was "out of it" too, but they COULD help
it--rather like a jerk in General American parlance.  A dork would run into
you in the hallway, knock you down and run on his way because he wanted to
get in the last seat in the TV room during the World Series ahead of you.  A
nerd might knock you down, but that was because he was daydreaming about
some girl that he didn't have a hope of getting near, and didn't see you.
(Trying to get into the 20-yr-old's mindset here).

We didn't have dorkwads and geekwads--I think they might have come to Ann
Arbor later, but we sure had shitwads and fuckwads, who were even more
malicious than dorks. If we knew one, we used to say that the Michigan dorms
were East Quad (hence "Quaddie"), South Quad, West Quad, and Fuck Quad, the
last being that guy's apartment.

I can't remember what the term was for what we call a nerd today.  The
engineers we shared a dorm with (who you could tell by their crew cuts,
slide rules and white socks) were simply "engines".  The only term that
sounds like my old vocab was "swot", and that comes from my U. of Edinburgh
graduate school days later on.  Things like "grade grubber" were around, but
that's not quite the same thing.

Paul Johnston
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Keer" <edkeer at YAHOO.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: Collegiate "geek" in the '70s (was Re: Synonymy avoidance)


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ed Keer <edkeer at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Collegiate "geek" in the '70s (was Re: Synonymy
avoidance)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>
> But don't forget that the geekwads and dorkwads formed
> a historic wad alliance. While the nerds have no wad.
>
> Ed
>
>
> --- Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:46:39 -0500, Michael McKernan
> > <mckernan at LOCALNET.COM> wrote:
> >
> > >Good to see nerd/nurd appear in this thread.  I
> > almost included it as a
> > >'whin' analog in my geek/dork post (and it actually
> > appeared in the later
> > >text of the online ad which prompted my post).
> > >
> > >But whadabout dork?
> > >
> > >As I see/hear it, dork matches geek a lot more
> > closely than nerd does, in
> > >all the non-semantic aspects of synonymy.  Then
> > again, nobody else seems to
> > >be very interested in comparing geek/dork (nerd) to
> > gorse/furze (whin).
> >
> > I would say that in current usage, "geek" aligns
> > with "nerd", not "dork".
> > "Dork" is invariably pejorative, while both "geek"
> > and "nerd" have been
> > subject to melioration as the "techie" sense of both
> > terms has become more
> > prominent.  "Nerd" was first to undergo ironic
> > melioration, no doubt
> > inspired by the 1986 movie _Revenge of the Nerds_
> > (an expression
> > subsequently applied to the success of Bill Gates et
> > al.)  "Geek" has
> > followed the meliorative path of "nerd"-- witness
> > the article in the
> > latest _Time Magazine_ on the consumer-electronics
> > retailer Best Buy:
> >
> >
> http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1034713,00.html
> >
> > Part of Best Buy's recent success has been
> > attributed to their deployment
> > of "the Geek Squad", an army of knowledgeable
> > techies who work as "agents"
> > assisting befuddled customers.
> >
> > See also this 2003 _USA Today_ article on "geek
> > chic":
> >
> >
> http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-10-22-geek-chic_x.htm
> >
> >
> > --Ben Zimmer
> >
>
>
>
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