The meaning of all words shifts over time. Sometimes, terms that were once forceful expressions of disapproval—like “bad” and “naughty”—become watered down with milder connotations. Terms of praise or exaltation—such as “awesome” or “incredible”—may also lose their original force. Words may even reverse their meaning, such as the adoption of “wicked” for praise rather than blame.
Then comes a more explicitly cultural phenomenon: the gradual upward slide of an outsider term into mainstream culture. Popular music saw such transitions over the twentieth century, with forms like jazz, funk, and blues all achieving mainstream acceptability decades after their origins at the margins of society. As we begin our travels through the twenty-first century, a similar transformation is taking place in the technological realm—for we are witnesses to the rise and rise of the geek.
Geek arrived in English from Low German, in which a geck denoted a crazy person or fool, and it was this sense that provided its first English meaning. In the subculture of nineteenth-century carnivals, geeks were outsiders even among the outsiders, known for their bizarre and often disgusting acts. In early American traveling circuses, the “geek show” traditionally involved a performer biting off and then eating the heads of live chickens.
Exactly how this insult escaped carnival culture and became generic is mysterious (although William Gresham’s carnival-set 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, and subsequent film, had a lot to do with it). By the 1980s, however, the arrival of geeks as we know them had been cemented in iconic style by the coming-of-age film Sixteen Candles (1984), courtesy of a character known as “The Geek,” whose brainy awkwardness helped establish the term as a mocking label.
The pejorative sense remained, for a while. But, as a generation of tech-savvy youngsters began to provide the first generation of internet millionaires, and then billionaires, the unthinkable happened: geeks began to become cool.
It’s difficult to put a precise date on it—but the modern world has embraced both the word and the notion of geek culture (not to mention its conveniently rhyming fashion associate, “geek chic”).
As much as anything, the transition is an index of technology’s infiltration of almost every aspect of popular culture. Apple’s first iPod appeared in 2001, and rapidly became an icon. Today, the notion of buying new music via anything other than digital download feels quaint, or at least a willed exercise in nostalgia. Video games—once the very embodiment of a marginal, antisocial cultural force—have become both mainstream and fashionable.
Interestingly, the supremacy of geek has come partly at the expense of another word used to describe the technologically astute but socially inept: nerd. This term is considerably younger than geek, being first recorded in 1950 in the Dr. Seuss story “If I Ran the Zoo,” where it denoted a strange creature (from the land of Ka-Troo). On a quite possibly unrelated note, it first seems to have been recorded in the slang sense of an unfashionable outsider the following year.
By the late 1960s, nerd had begun to achieve pop-cultural prominence, boosted still further by its usage in the 1970s sitcom Happy Days and later—perhaps its linguistic apotheosis—in the title of the 1984 satirical film Revenge of the Nerds, cementing its status as the term of choice for all smart-but-inept citizens.
Today, perhaps because of this firm anchoring in 1980s culture, nerd just sounds a little too quaint and insufficiently technological to do justice to twenty-first-century culture. The nerds may have had their revenge but, as headline writers have been punning at least since the 1990s, it’s geeks that are set to inherit the earth.