Dork

[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.

Were such distinctions available to the ancient Saxons?

JL

Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Damien Hall
Subject: Dork
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com