Dork

[Damien Hall]

Michael McKernan wrote:

'And I'm still wondering why no one has chimed in with a positive definition
or other comment on dork.  Is the word just too dorky?'

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.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania