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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Sorry, but "dork" never means "guy who bites heads off live chickens" and "geek" often does.

JL

Michael McKernan <mckernan at LOCALNET.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Michael McKernan
Subject: Re: Collegiate "geek" in the '70s (was Re: Synonymy avoidance)
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Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>"Geek" appeared as a synonym for "nurd" in National Lampoon's 1977 poster
>"Are You a Nurd?" -- see Barry Popik's post:
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0002A&L=ads-l&P=R3030
>
>Also, Barnhart and Metcalf gave "geek" as their word of the year for 1978
>in _America in So Many Words_, though I don't know what that was based on.


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).

Michael McKernan


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