Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
Are you a geek or a nerd? Maybe you don’t want to admit it, but chances are you may have some qualities of both in you. But what is the real difference between the two terms?
“Geek” comes to us from history, being a term coined all the way back in the 1500s. At that time, it was reserved for a person thought to be a fool.
Another possibility is that it comes from the 18th-century word “gecken” used during the reign of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it referred to circus performers who specialized in biting heads off live chickens.Fast-forward to the 1950s and the word geek came to mean what it essentially does today, designating someone who is very passionately into technology or certain sub-cultures. You can have academic geeks, computer geeks, film geeks, Star Wars geeks, video game geeks, food and fashion geeks and so forth. Geeks gather collections of objects, facts, and mementos related to their obsessive interests, as Big Think wrote previously. Geeks can also fix things for you, a fact used by the retailer Best Buy in naming its repair division the Geek Squad.
A “nerd” could be similarly passionate but focused on achievement over collection, preferring to gain knowledge and skills rather than trivia. One fun bit of trivia, however: the term nerd was invented by none other than the beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss in 1950 when he wrote, “A nerkle, a nerd, and a seersucker too!” in his book If I Ran the Zoo.
In 1951, a Newsweek article pointed out that the term started to become popular as a synonym for a “drip” or a “square” in Detroit, Michigan. The usage of the word just spread from there, entering popular culture in the 1970s when it was frequently used…
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