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

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:47:54 -0600, Sally O. Donlon <sod at LOUISIANA.EDU>
wrote:

>I told my middle school daughter and her friends about the geek
>reference to biting off chicken heads and they were not only grossed
>out, but heavily offended because to them it means the
>really-smart-kid-who-may-be-uncool-now-but-who-everyone-knows-will-
>grow-up-to-be-another-Bill-Gates.

As a reasonably well-read child in the '70s and '80s, I hardly ever came
across the carnival-performer sense of "geek".  I remember being a little
perplexed when I listened carefully to Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man":

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible"
As he hands you a bone.

That was probably my first exposure to the term.  Later on I heard it in
the Ramones song "I'm Against It" (from their 1978 _Road to Ruin_ album):
"I don't like Jesus freaks, I don't like circus geeks."  And I think I
came across the expression "geek show", though it wasn't clear to me that
it meant anything different from "freak show".  (My primary source of
knowledge on old-fashioned circus freaks, Tod Browning's cult film
_Freaks_, did not feature any chicken-head-biting geeks, to the best of my
recollection.)


--Ben Zimmer