Dork

[Jonathan Lighter]

My powerful theoretical argument in this case is "What I say goes."

This appears to be similar to the theory that informs your own position. Frankly I would prefer to be called a geek or a nerd rather than a dork, though certainly I have been called all three, particularly after blind dates.

Shall we step outside to settle this ?

JL

Michael McKernan <mckernan at LOCALNET.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Michael McKernan
Subject: Re: Dork
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I beg to differ, Jonathan. Damien's example seems to me to be a clear case
of someone 'nowadays' taking 'pride in being a certain sort of 'dork'. But
perhaps I'm being too empirical, and you may have a powerful theoretical
argument for your analysis, rather than an emotional one based on your
personal understanding or intuition. Or maybe her stomach couldn't stand
the chicken heads. Whadda I know? Not much, but I seem to hear and see an
occaisional meliorated dork 'nowadays'. If there is a 'rule' underlying
such transformations, why would dork (or any other term) be excluded, while
geek and nerd are allowed rehabilitation?

Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>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 wrote:

>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


Michael McKernan


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