Dork

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Damien Hall:
>
>Here you go. One of the sophomores in the Linguistics 001 class I TA'd
>for last semester (a girl, from Southern CA I think), when her turn came
>to introduce herself to the rest of the class, described herself as a
>'grammar dork' and proceeded to give several examples of things that
>annoyed her ('Betsy and me went to the store', etc). Personally, I would
>have associated such annoyance with *geek*iness. Of course, I'm British
>and don't have *dork* in my native vocab at all, but my intuition about
>'dork' and 'geek' does seem to chime with those of the other contributors
>to this thread.

Jonathan Lighter:
>
>Nowadays one may take pride in being a certain sort of "geek."  But a
>"dork"?  Never.
>
>Your student was deprecating her geekiness by ascribing it to simple
>dorkiness.

Michael McKernan:
>
>I beg to differ, Jonathan. Damien's example seems to me to be a clear case
>of someone 'nowadays' taking 'pride in being a certain sort of 'dork'. But
>perhaps I'm being too empirical, and you may have a powerful theoretical
>argument for your analysis, rather than an emotional one based on your
>personal understanding or intuition.  Or maybe her stomach couldn't stand
>the chicken heads.  Whadda I know?  Not much, but I seem to hear and see an
>occaisional meliorated dork 'nowadays'. If there is a 'rule' underlying
>such transformations, why would dork (or any other term) be excluded, while
>geek and nerd are allowed rehabilitation?

Who says the student was taking "pride" in being a grammar dork?  A Google
search on "grammar dork" finds 147 examples, and it's usually ascribed to
someone pejoratively (or to oneself in a self-deprecating manner: "I hate
to be a grammar dork, but...").  As we all know, being a stickler for
grammar is not exactly a source of pride for most of today's yout'.

There are 2,230 hits for "grammar geek" and 730 for "grammar nerd" -- and
those are mostly deprecating usages also.  Clearly it's the *computer*
geek/nerd who has been rehabilitated, not the grammar geek/nerd (yet!).

"Dork", when used in combining forms, appears limited to nebbish pursuits
lacking much prestige in youthful circles.  "Band dork" appears pretty
common (5,600 hits), as does "music dork" (3,270 hits).  There's also
"theater/theatre dork" (739 hits).  And to go along with "grammar dork",
there's "language dork" (122 hits) and "spelling dork" (118 hits).

Compare also:

"geek pride": 10,500
"nerd pride":  3,940
"dork pride":    641


--Ben Zimmer