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

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:16:50 -0800, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>For the record, notes jotted down on the very scene show that "nerd" was
>indeed in use at NYU in 1970.  But it had nothing to do with technology.
>It was simply a person who was in some usually petty way annoying or
>obnoxious.

The techie variety of "nerd"/"nurd", not surprisingly, developed at tech
schools.  There's evidence on this site that "nurd" was in use at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the mid-'60s:

http://home.comcast.net/~brons/NerdCorner/nerd.html

See the article and photo from the Homecoming 1965 edition of RPI's humor
magazine, _The Bachelor_: "Why are 61 nurds so excited?" (reprinted from:
<http://www.drkenner.com/html/rpi_bachelor.htm>).

By the spring of 1970, "(g)nurd"/"nerd" was in common usage at MIT,
clearly in a wonkish sense:

-----
http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_090/TECH_V090_S0131_P004.pdf
The Tech (MIT), Apr. 7, 1970, p. 4, col. 4
So let's settle back and take a tour of MIT, a la General Catalogue,
69/70. At MIT we have tools (p. 40) and nurds (p. 44, bottom); we also
feature extra-curricular activities, but only for
crew-cut-scholar-athlete-
Eagle-Scout-All-American-boys (pp. 27, 28, 61).
-----
http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_090/TECH_V090_S0216_P003.pdf
The Tech (MIT), May 12, 1970, p. 3, col. 1
Fifty drug-crazed filthy hippies (Dope has ruined their minds!) gather,
smoking pot, spraying paint. They are, for the most part, MIT students;
some of them even have secret identities -- mild-mannered gnurds in a
Great Eastern Technological University.
-----
http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_090/TECH_V090_S0228_P003.pdf
The Tech (MIT), May 19, 1970, p. 3, col. 1
What then does it [sc. _Technique_, MIT's yearbook] have? ... "The Nerd,"
a thoroughly nurdly treatment of a species with which the author obviously
has empathy.
-----

(Note adjectival "nurdly" in the last cite -- HDAS has "nerdly" from 1992.)


--Ben Zimmer