That pretty much was the geekiest nay nerdiest comment ever!

Both geek and nerd are pejorative terms which suggest, at the very least, the presence of serious deficiencies in an individual. Take the term “geek”, for example, which originally meant “fool” and in its Dutch variant (as the word is of Germanic origin), still retains a similar meaning. At some point, the term, close to its present meaning, made the transition from pejorative to complementary, within geekdom. Privations were then exalted as virtues. This phenomenon is not unique; feelings of rejection from some community often lead to the formation of new communities. In the case of more militant geeks, the wholesale negation of the essential values of the “rejecting community” is a sort of Coue method which functions to repress the underlying feeling of inferiority. Inevitably, this approach leads to even more bizarre behavior, often necessarily at odds with the perceived establishment, which is conflated with social phenomena in as many ways as Texans can prepare corn or BBQ or whatever the hell it is that they prepare in countless varieties.

Geek, intrinsically, is someone with the following characteristics (note that these are not exclusive to the geek; some are shared by grandiose, ambitious, pompous snobs as well): an intellectual cretin or pseudo-intellectual lacking common sense (in the true sense); a gadget whore; trivial in personality; closed-minded; prideful and arrogant; boring and annoying; short-sighted; stunted psychological development.

The geek will doubtless feel great offense at the mere suggestion that they exhibit any of these privations. The reaction is to be expected, since the geek’s lack of understanding of these privations, coupled with the lack of self-awareness (and the willingness to conform to an archetype projected by the community) renders him/her blind to the obvious, namely, that they suck, and instead of dealing with the suck, they praise the suck, and distract themselves with something else. You can always count on a geek to maintain the contradictory lust for illusive Hollywood characterizations of anything “brainy” along with a zeal for dabbling in its real analogue.

The need to identify with “geekdom” per se implies at least some of these characteristics. However, some identify with geekdom because of a misperception of what it means to be a geek. We can brush this off as the success of geek propagandists.

Nerd, to me, is a nebulous term. At best, it describes a socially incompetent individual with some niche interest. I am unable to elaborate further, but the meaning is pejorative and suggests someone unpleasant, smarmy and unctuous, very much like the geek.

I personally would prefer to destroy the visages of geekdom and nerddom, and characterized traits in other people, as well as myself, in a more sophisticated fashion, and not the brain-dead labels above. It only serves to encourage eugenics (although admittedly, the reproduction mechanism for geeks is unknown to science, which presents such endeavors with a serious problem).