[In Europe] smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I’ve known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars)
That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students’ club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it’s not at all unusual in Europe.
Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America
That’s a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire contient that contains countries as different as, say, Canada and Nicaragua, or Alabama and San Francisco.
OK, that was an imprecise statement—by “North America,” I meant the U.S. and Canada, not the standard usage of the term.
When it comes to the U.S. and Canada, however, I stand behind my assertion. There are indeed significant cultural differences between, say, Alabama and Northern California, but not when it comes to this question.
I’ve also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that’s unimaginable.
These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards “geek / nice guy” and “masculine bad boy” in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.
That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger’s Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.
Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between “men of action” and “men of reflection” in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the “man of reflection” was the “effete intellectual” or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of “nerd” is the descendant of the “man of reflection” and “effete intellectual” stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg’s examples:
Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s story was a classic example of “nerd vs jock,” where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways
Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses
He argues that ancient Greeks didn’t have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.
Emerson’s speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):
There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men’ sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, — who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day, — are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.
[...]
Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
[...]
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,
“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.
[...]
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.
Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to “throw away books from the past, and write your own,” which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.
He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes “Man Thinking,” but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word “mincing”), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. “infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness”). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:
Non-scholars are much more lacking in original thought than scholars
Non-scholars are plenty lazy, too
What about men of action who are temperamentally timid?
He speaks disdainfully of scholars having “second thoughts,” but wasn’t he criticizing them earlier for being too credulous? Can’t men of action who are engaging their subject matter hands-on have second thoughts?
Why can’t you both read books, and carve out your heroic path in your field?
In domains with low-hanging empirical fruit, I’ll buy his argument that scholars should get more hands-on. In other domains, it’s best to read the book, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Why are the intellectual errors Emerson criticizes associated with women or homosexuality? Why can’t we have feminine or homosexual men of action? Would Alan Turing fit into Emerson’s notion of the “American scholar”?
That’s a very interesting reference, I’ll try to check it out when I find some time. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Emerson’s work, so I can’t tell if Anderegg is representing his views fairly. But in any case, I’ve always found the American phenomenon of equating intellectual interests with “nerdiness” alien and weird, and its exact historical origins are still a mystery to me, so I’ll be interested in checking out the book and seeing if it sheds some light on it.
Another funny example of the nerd stereotype: Georges St. Pierre (aka GSP), the current UFC Welterweight Champion and one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the world, thinks of himself as a nerd because he is into paleontology.
“I don’t like to tell people that very much, but I am. I don’t really watch sports. I watch the Canadian version of the Discovery Channel. Ask me a question about the Jurassic period or the Cretaceous period and I probably could answer it… Seriously, I’m into paleontology. That’s the study of prehistoric life. I’m into philosophy. And psychology too. You know that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was found with feathers? Yes, feathers!”
“When I train, I love to take time off and fly to the Natural History Museum or an exhibition. I just love that. When you know your past, it will help you with your future… That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with. I’m married to my work right now. But you never know. One day I could wake up and just do something different. Life is so unpredictable.”
I also recall Michelle Bachmann describing herself as a “nerd” because she watches science programs on TV. Look—occasionally going to museums or reading books or watching educational TV shows should be normal. It’s not a distinguishing characteristic.
I don’t describe myself as a “nerd” on OkCupid because it just seems like a meaningless term by now. If you’re looking for someone who’s interested in ideas, well, I’m in academia, so that should tell you all you need to know. If you’re looking for someone a little shy and silly, that’ll come across too.
It is not normal for humans to occasionally go to musea or watch education TV shows, so it is indeed non-trivially informative to learn this about a human. It also clusters with other dispositional characteristics and therefore is useful for low-cost classifiers.
Because humans don’t know much about the natural sciences, and certainly not in terms of predictive models, I have difficulty communicating with most of them about paperclip engineering topics. For example, when I start talking about endurance limits, I lose over 99% of the audience. It would be understandable if they could grasp the concept but weren’t familiar with that particular term (it just means the stress—load per unit area—that a mechanical component could endure in tension for an arbitrary long period when applied cyclically i.e. on/off).
But that’s not the situtation here. Their only knowledge of metallurgy and materials science is brief regurgitation of text that doesn’t even map to a prediction as far as they’re aware. So stuff is made out of atoms? Great, what predictions can you make with that? (That’s on the better end of the human clippiness spectrum!!!)
Yes, it still means that people with intellectual interests aren’t quite socially acceptable.
Admittedly, there’s a paradox—he’s saying something that he “doesn’t tell people very much” in an ESPN interview—we’ve not talking about a gigantic stigma. Still, I don’t think he’d talk about a fondness for NASCAR racing in the same way.
The funny thing is that car racing is also a technical subject. As Anderegg points out in the “Nerds” book, it’s strange that some intellectual and technical pursuits get a “pass” on being “nerdy” because they are associated with masculinity, such as playing fantasy football or being a car mechanic.
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person’s interests. The other meaning concerns a person’s social skills. GSP calls himself a nerd because of his interests. After calling himself a nerd, he makes a half-baked attempt at presenting himself as socially inept (“I have a hard time finding a girlfriend”), but we don’t have to believe him.
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word “nerd” to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word “nerd” have in fact started to separate in English.
If “nerd” once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either “socially inept person” or “person with a keen interest in an unusual topic”, without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here’s proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
If all this is correct, then the word “nerd” is in fact evolving away from the concept that rolled the two ideas into one, i.e., the idea of keen interest in an unusual topic and the idea of social ineptness.
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person’s interests. The other meaning concerns a person’s social skills.
The real puzzle is not about the current meaning of the term, but why the former is normally taken to imply the latter. The existence of a widely used term that covers both meanings is just evidence that this connection is widely made, not an explanation of why it exists.
[Edit: the rest of this comment is based on an incorrect reading. See the replies below.]
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word “nerd” to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word “nerd” have in fact started to separate in English.
If “nerd” once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either “socially inept person” or “person with a keen interest in an unusual topic”, without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here’s proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
I think your analysis is wrong. GSP (or at least the public persona he’s presenting) is clearly an example that defies the stereotype. Yet because he fulfills one element of the stereotype, GSP seems unable to conceive of the possibility that he might be an exception to the other ones (or, alternatively, believes that claiming to be such would be absurd), and feels obliged to present himself as someone who indeed conforms to it wholly.
This is evidence of the tremendous strength of the stereotype: since GSP displays “nerdy” intellectual interests, then despite the extreme appearance to the contrary, somehow he still must have a nerdy essence that makes him unattractive to women and ostracized by the cool and popular social circles.
(I should add that the word “stereotype” is nowadays often used with strong moralistic meaning, but I’m using it as a neutral technical term for heuristics for categorizing people based on statistical discrimination.)
That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with.
Actually, he doesn’t believe that being a nerd means his social skills are so poor he can’t attract a woman. He believes (perhaps accurately) that he’s only interested in the relatively rare women who share his nerd interests.
What’s interesting is that he associates being a nerd with having difficulty finding partners, even though the connection isn’t by way of poor social skills.
Interesting. So it looks more like it’s a new meaning all the way down the line, as he uses the term. He has even supplied a new explanation (pickiness) for the old phenomenon (having a limited set of friends), which was previously explained by ineptness. It was easy to be confused because he is describing the familiar outward pattern of the nerd, even though he has a new explanation for it. Genuine linguistic evolution here?
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
People have limited self knowledge and are constantly rationalizing what they just did or just said. Their self explanations are not definitive.
I believe your argument requires that he has in fact mislabeled himself on the basis of an imperfect match between himself and the word. “nerd”, and that he followed up by confabulating to make himself a better fit for the definition.
In contrast, I argue that the word is in flux (as is the related stereotype), that he is correctly applying a new meaning, but that he misunderstands his own statement. I think self-misunderstanding is commonplace, so I find thus to be a natural, unforced possibility, rather than a contrivance. I think that the meaning of the word “nerd” has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
Added: I propose ostensive definition as the key mechanism of change.
Step 1: “a nerd is a socially inept person with special interests...”.
Step 2: …”like Bill Gates.”
Step 3: “a nerd is a person like Bill Gates...”
Step 4: ”...who is famous for becoming fantastically wealthy through his special interests.”
From Step 1 to step 2, examples are generated. From step 3 to step 4, the examples yield a changed definition because what was most conspicuous about the examples has changed.
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
I agree that my comment was incorrect, and based on an inaccurate reading of what GSP said. Taking that into account, you’re probably right that he is applying only the “obscure interests” meaning to himself.
That said, I don’t think the general use of the word has lost much, if any of its negative connotations, nor that the underlying stereotypes are becoming any weaker. You say:
I think that the meaning of the word “nerd” has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
But notice that the public perception of Bill Gates is still in accordance with the full “nerd” stereotype. Watch the joke video that he made when he retired. What it clearly shows is that within the ranks of the rich, powerful, and famous, his position is very much like the position of a nerd kid among his more popular school peers: he is proud just because they’re giving him some attention, and views this as a boost to his status. (Consider how unimaginable the opposite would be!) Certainly, despite all the money, power, and fame, nobody ever considered Gates as someone to admire and emulate in terms of style or social behavior, and not to even mention his complete lack of sex-symbol status.
Moreover, even if the nerd stereotype acquired some positive connotations in terms of good career prospects during the eighties and nineties, this trend could only have been downward for the last decade or so, considering that both the economic and general social status of tech professions has been going down ever since the dot-com crash. The ongoing deindustrialization is increasingly catching up even with white-collar technical work.
I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka “Wasp”, the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she’s obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it’s a very different kind of disconnect from the “nerd” disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu’s Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she’s no goth, doesn’t go around in black leather, but she’s still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it’s Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there’s the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd—and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I’m out. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I’m starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I’ve only seen a couple of the HP movies—is Hermione’s character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she’s presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Being disliked for knowing so much is not the same thing as being socially inept. But my recollection is that she was attacked primarily for being muggle-born, and more by Draco Malfoy than by anybody else. It’s been a while.
In the first movie Emma Watson was very much like the drawn character, becoming markedly less so in the later movies, maybe in part because the movies were made every two years or so, which meant that the actors quickly outgrew their characters. But the movies have been, I think, very faithful to the books as far as story and character go, within the necessary constraints.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
Yes, those were definitely nerds in the bad old dual studious/inept sense. However, Willow Rosenberg was much more central to the series. Wikipedia actually says, “Willow is a shy and nerdy girl with little confidence,” and, “Willow is presented as a bookish nerd with considerable computer skills, dowdily dressed and easily intimidated by more popular girls in school.”
buffy.wikia.com says, “Willow started out as a meek and largely unassertive computer nerd, but eventually grew to be a powerful and authoritative individual,” and, “In her early years at high school, Willow is a shy, naïve nerd with a light, risqué sense of humor. A member of the Math, Science, and Computer clubs, she is the person to go to for tutoring help. Willow is ridiculed by her more popular classmates, including cheerleaders Cordelia Chase and Harmony Kendall.” It includes the corporate explanation of the shift in Willow:
Joss Whedon explained, “The incredibly nerdy clothes that she’s wearing, you’ll see her wearing for exactly one episode, because [the network] kept sending us memos ‘You must make her more hip. You must make her more cool. You must make her more… like Buffy’ which confused me because, you know, I wanted to do an ensemble show and ensemble means that people are different. Besides, I think that outfit’s really cute.”
Which suggests that Whedon wanted to sustain Willow as more of a nerd in all respects, but the suits said no, and so this is why Willow became more of a Hermione and less of a female Anthony Michael Hall. Harry Potter came out in 1997 and Buffy (TV series) came out in the same year. Even though both the HP books and Buffy continued for many years, the characters were sufficiently established early on that my guess is that there was minimal influence.
Thinking of female nerds, The Mummy’s librarian pops into my head. Played by Rachel Weisz. Some degree of social awkwardness, but not really all that much. Definitely studious—knows enough to wake the antagonist.
In light of Whedon’s remark, it looks like you can thank corporate headquarters for the memorable succession of dresses. But Hannigan was smoking hot whatever she wore.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I’m not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a “computer genius” character having just about every stereotypical “nerdy” characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his “nerdy” computer knowledge (he’s depicted as living in his parents’ basement in his thirties).
While that computer hacker lived in his mom’s basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.
For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom’s basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop’s daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.
It’s easy to charge that I’ve been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.
I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:
Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day.
Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with “most prevalent in the 70s and 80s”. Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary’s history of the word “nerd” appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word “nerd” accrued the intellectual element to its earlier “dud” meaning—and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article’s claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.
But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.
You’re right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.
On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to “nerdy” kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.
This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely “nerdy” and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day. …Ok, Gates still looks kinda like that, but he’s a billionaire now, wanna make something of it? You would think the nerds ruling the world nowadays would make this a Discredited Trope, but there’s enough Truth In Television to Geek Physiques to keep this one running.
Type 2: Take your average attractive actor or actress and stick on Nerd Glasses, a lab coat and some mussed hair and clothes to make them Hollywood Homely. They are probably also Hollywood Dateless, and the social ineptitude may only be an Informed Flaw. They may even shoot straight into Hot Scientist or Hot Librarian territory without help from their smarts to pull it off. May be involved in an Ugly Duckling Beautiful All Along story if they do get paired off with someone.
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn’t do so in a believable way, so I’m not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the “nerd” stereotype.
The “hacker” archetype is a bit different. “Hacker” incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long’s Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long’s character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It’s much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn’t good at math and his mind “doesn’t work that way.” Justin Long’s Mac character is a textbook “Hollywood Nerd.”
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
To avoid getting far off track, citing these fictions was in order to make a point about the changing meaning of “nerd”. With that in mind, look at what the article you linked to says about real nerds:
In Real Life, nerds can run the entire spectrum of “beauty” and social prowess, from unattractive and socially inept to drop dead gorgeous and a social butterfly. Like most people, most nerds are simply of average looks and social skills. The only thing that really differentiates nerds from anyone else is their intense interest in niche topics.
That’s agreeing with my thesis about what the concept of “nerd” has come to mean recently. The article writer thinks that it is distinguishing real nerds (who are distinguished only by intense interest in niche topics) from Hollywood Nerds (who are type 1 or type 2). But if you simply look at a dictionary (none of them have been updated to reflect the new meaning—the latest shift is too recent), the word “nerd” did not just mean someone with an interest in niche topics. By (earlier) definition, a nerd was not “of average looks and social skills”. The word has been gutted of its earlier meaning and emotional impact, making it no longer, or at least less, painful for someone to call themselves a nerd.
The American Heritage Dictionary traces the meaning of “nerd” through time. In 1957, meant “square”, which, looking it up, meant conventional or old-fashioned or opposed to current trends. Nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. Then in 1970, an uninteresting person, a “dud”. Again, nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. At some point, the concept of “nerd” gained the element of keen and single-minded interest in niche and especially technical topics. while retaining the “dud” element. But now we see, in the article you link to, that “nerd” has, at least for some, dropped the “dud” element and retained only the (relatively new) element of interest in niche topics.
Yup. And there are other examples. Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, another current comedy. But Big Bang Theory is much more hard core. However Big Bang Theory is, I think, not the cultural benchmark that The Breakfast Club was.
Edit: just thinking further, it occurs to me that Albert Einstein, with his dress and his hair, must have greatly informed the cultural stereotype of the badly dressed genius. Doctor Who is I think a sometimes “cool” version of Einstein. I think there’s some overlap between the absentminded professor (as in flubber), the nutty professor (as in Jerry Lewis), Dick Van Dyke of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the nerd. We have the high intelligence, the being lost in one’s interests, the social awkwardness and obliviousness, and so on. Shared among the absentminded professor types (informed, whether justly or unjustly I don’t know, by the common idea of Einstein) and also the nerds.
I’ll take your word for the cultural benchmark, it didn’t make as much impact on the rest of the world as it did the states (I hadn’t heard of it until 1997)
Speaking of 1985, and crazy scientists you get Doc Brown. Now he was a cool version of Einstein, hair and all. Well actually Einstein is probably considered fairly cool for a scientist, the crazy tongue photo gives the impression he didn’t take himself too seriously.
In the meantime, I read the chapters of Anderegg’s book you cited above. I find his thesis very interesting, but as always in the history of ideas, it’s hard to estimate the relative significance of particular cultural tropes, especially since I know little about all the other factors that could have influenced the development of this characteristic modern American stereotype. I’ve put his book on my reading list, so I’ll probably have more comments when I get to reading it.
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate may actually be culturally localized.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate is actually culturally localized.
I don’t see why these specific patterns of behavior would seem “absolutely innate” even looking only at the U.S. There are lots of non-nerdy people with high intelligence, and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t excel in “nerdy” professions if they chose to enter them in large numbers. In my opinion, the main reason why non-nerdy smart people go mainly into non-technical professions is that in the American society, technical professions, on the whole, offer relatively low status considering the demands they impose.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
Where I lived in Europe (various places in ex-Yugoslavia), we’ve never really had anything comparable to the American notion of “geeks” and “nerds.” It’s hard to find even an approximate translation for these words which would have all the connotations of high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things.
We do have words that denote these qualities separately, or for people who put excessive effort into success in school while lacking real-life skills and smarts, or who achieve high grades thanks to cramming rather than smarts and talent, etc., etc., and various terms of this sort are used to translate “nerd/geek” in different contexts. But there is no accurate translation, simply because there is no striking correlation between all these attributes. (That said, in recent years some of the American “geek” culture has been making inroads, but even what exists of it is still not comparable, since there is both less social nerdiness involved and much less correlation with interest, let alone high achievement, in science and engineering.)
Partly this is because technical professions have higher relative status, so they attract plenty of intelligent people who are not at all deficient in social skills. The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people’s innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in “geeky” social circles and activities, since they can’t find them anywhere else.
All that said, this situation still does not mean that success in courting women is more evenly distributed among men. On the contrary: the attention of attractive women, and the overwhelming part of casual sex that takes place, is still restricted to the minority of men who are attractive by pretty much the same criteria as anywhere else. It’s just that you’ll find many more such men (as well as less attractive, but still far from nerdy men) among people doing technical professions and having various intellectual interests that are stereotyped as “geeky” in the U.S.
Vladimir M asserts that in Europe, “technical professions have higher relative status”.
That agrees with my experience. My mom used to say that my engineer father would have higher status if he lived in the old country. Also, when letters from Europe arrived for my dad, his name was sometimes prefaced with the honorific “Ing.” which is short for “Ingenieur”, which means “Engineer”.
The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people’s innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in “geeky” social circles and activities, since they can’t find them anywhere else.
How is the educational system different?
As you may know, there’s been a lot of interest lately in the US about how to lessen or eliminate bullying in schools—there’ve been a number of suicides lately resulting from years of severe bullying.
The only structural cause I’ve seen suggested (as distinct from recommendations of active anti-bullying programs) is the high emphasis on competitive athletics, and in particular, athletic competitions between schools.
The other question is whether there’s a process of bullying/ostracism in European schools which is aimed at other sorts of people.
I don’t have anything resembling a complete theory of these differences. It’s certainly not about some clearly identifiable and straightforward organizational aspects that could be reformed in a planned way, and there are definitely deep cultural differences involved.
One organizational difference that seems significant, though, is that I went through a system that had tracking done in such a way that smart kids of all sorts ended up separated from the not so bright ones, but largely mixed together, without being allowed to segregate by electing different coursework. (You had a choice of high schools with different curriculums, but everyone within the same high school had to learn the same, usually eclectic mix of things.) This did seem to create an optimal environment for introverted smart kids to grow up without being exposed to bullying (which was unheard of in the high school I went to), and giving them less inclination and opportunity to self-segregate into “nerdy” cliques.
There is bullying/ostracism however it isn’t as formalised.
I would be tempted to blame the sports. Simply it creates an in group of people that are considered higher status. There are pep rallies to them, with beautiful girls cheering them on, that has to create an inflated sense of worth/superiority/difference.
So they persecute the out group, the geeks, to signal their in-group ness and preserve their sense of superiority. I suppose it is similar to the stanford prison experiment. Raise one group above another and that group seems to persecute the other.
I would be tempted to blame the sports. Simply it creates an in group of people that are considered higher status. There are pep rallies to them, with beautiful girls cheering them on, that has to create an inflated sense of worth/superiority/difference.
It’s definitely not the sports that do it. You may be right about all the rest of the stuff that is associated with sport over there. Cheerleaders? That’s not just in the teen movies right, you actually have them?
Does being a nerd and a good athlete seem out of place in that culture? Come to think of it there is a separate group for ‘band nerds’ too if my consumption of low grade entertainment is anything to go by. I wouldn’t know where to put myself!
Yeah by sports I meant the importance given to it. In comparison we don’t have such things as sports scholarships (irrespective of academic talent, which I think is called an entrance scholarship) for prestigious universities. Does Australia?
I’m a Pom, so my exposure to American culture is mainly fictional in nature as well. I’ve seen a number of documentaries as well though. The BBC loves analysing the US.
Yeah by sports I meant the importance given to it. In comparison we don’t have such things as sports scholarships (irrespective of academic talent, which I think is called an entrance scholarship) for prestigious universities. Does Australia?
Heck no. University sports here are relatively obscure. They are there for students who enjoy them but they are approximately status neutral.
Athletes don’t do all the bullying—not even most of it, I think.
That’s not a necessary implication of whpearson’s theory. Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can’t achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.
I didn’t go myself through the American school system, though, so I have no idea how well this hypothesis holds water.
Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can’t achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.
I didn’t go through the American school system either but your theory seems to match with general observable tendencies. Bullying and crude social aggression isn’t an indicator of high status so much as an indicator of ‘medium high status that requires effort to maintain’. This is why I make sure I never work for an insecure boss.
If you mean people that don’t like to party, then from my experience they are doing science and engineering and probably some humanities as well. They also generally co-exist quite happily with the party-ers, at least at University level.
I’ve just realised how much we have a cultural one way mirror. I’ve seen fictional depictions of fraternities, keg standing, hazing etc, however you probably haven’t seen what a European rock concert is like. Which is generally non-violent, unless you get in the mosh pit.
I say European, but in some ways I have less idea of what mainland European social life is like than American.
Vladimir_M’s “high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things” is good enough except that I’d add lack of femininity to the list.
One horrifying feature of American culture in the 50s was that intelligence was considered not masculine and not feminine, and since everyone was supposed to be one or the other, being visibly intelligent had a social cost. In my opinion, a major (but incomplete) change in this happened when it was clear that people could make money in IT. I’m inclined to think the Flynn effect is also taking hold.
From a science fiction convention: A women mentions that sometimes she feels she’s just got to do something different with her hair, and fannish women are apt to look at her as though she’s crazy.
Historical note: I think that identifying interest in dressing up with being effeminate is a modern weirdness. The only culture I can think of where men and women who could afford to didn’t get about equally elaborate and showy was colonial America, and in that case, the men were dressier.
Afaik, American rock concerts are mostly non-violent, but this is very much second hand. Anyone have more information?
Every mainstream rock concert I’ve ever been to in the US has been entirely non-violent, modulo the occasional and mostly unrelated edge cases that arise when you get a thousand drunk people together. Even metal and punk concerts aren’t violent outside of the mosh pit, and I’m not sure that properly counts as violence, being consensual and generally not aimed at causing injury.
Sounds a lot like the European case, in other words.
SarahC:
That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students’ club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it’s not at all unusual in Europe.
That’s a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire contient that contains countries as different as, say, Canada and Nicaragua, or Alabama and San Francisco.
OK, that was an imprecise statement—by “North America,” I meant the U.S. and Canada, not the standard usage of the term.
When it comes to the U.S. and Canada, however, I stand behind my assertion. There are indeed significant cultural differences between, say, Alabama and Northern California, but not when it comes to this question.
Whoa.
I’ve also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that’s unimaginable.
These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards “geek / nice guy” and “masculine bad boy” in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.
That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger’s Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.
Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between “men of action” and “men of reflection” in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the “man of reflection” was the “effete intellectual” or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of “nerd” is the descendant of the “man of reflection” and “effete intellectual” stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg’s examples:
Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s story was a classic example of “nerd vs jock,” where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways
Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses
He argues that ancient Greeks didn’t have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of the American scholar
Emerson’s speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):
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[...]
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Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to “throw away books from the past, and write your own,” which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.
He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes “Man Thinking,” but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word “mincing”), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. “infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness”). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:
Non-scholars are much more lacking in original thought than scholars
Non-scholars are plenty lazy, too
What about men of action who are temperamentally timid?
He speaks disdainfully of scholars having “second thoughts,” but wasn’t he criticizing them earlier for being too credulous? Can’t men of action who are engaging their subject matter hands-on have second thoughts?
Why can’t you both read books, and carve out your heroic path in your field?
In domains with low-hanging empirical fruit, I’ll buy his argument that scholars should get more hands-on. In other domains, it’s best to read the book, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Why are the intellectual errors Emerson criticizes associated with women or homosexuality? Why can’t we have feminine or homosexual men of action? Would Alan Turing fit into Emerson’s notion of the “American scholar”?
That’s a very interesting reference, I’ll try to check it out when I find some time. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Emerson’s work, so I can’t tell if Anderegg is representing his views fairly. But in any case, I’ve always found the American phenomenon of equating intellectual interests with “nerdiness” alien and weird, and its exact historical origins are still a mystery to me, so I’ll be interested in checking out the book and seeing if it sheds some light on it.
Another funny example of the nerd stereotype: Georges St. Pierre (aka GSP), the current UFC Welterweight Champion and one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the world, thinks of himself as a nerd because he is into paleontology.
If GSP is a nerd, does the term make any sense?
“I’m a nerd” is a pet peeve of mine.
I also recall Michelle Bachmann describing herself as a “nerd” because she watches science programs on TV. Look—occasionally going to museums or reading books or watching educational TV shows should be normal. It’s not a distinguishing characteristic.
I don’t describe myself as a “nerd” on OkCupid because it just seems like a meaningless term by now. If you’re looking for someone who’s interested in ideas, well, I’m in academia, so that should tell you all you need to know. If you’re looking for someone a little shy and silly, that’ll come across too.
It is not normal for humans to occasionally go to musea or watch education TV shows, so it is indeed non-trivially informative to learn this about a human. It also clusters with other dispositional characteristics and therefore is useful for low-cost classifiers.
Because humans don’t know much about the natural sciences, and certainly not in terms of predictive models, I have difficulty communicating with most of them about paperclip engineering topics. For example, when I start talking about endurance limits, I lose over 99% of the audience. It would be understandable if they could grasp the concept but weren’t familiar with that particular term (it just means the stress—load per unit area—that a mechanical component could endure in tension for an arbitrary long period when applied cyclically i.e. on/off).
But that’s not the situtation here. Their only knowledge of metallurgy and materials science is brief regurgitation of text that doesn’t even map to a prediction as far as they’re aware. So stuff is made out of atoms? Great, what predictions can you make with that? (That’s on the better end of the human clippiness spectrum!!!)
Yes, it still means that people with intellectual interests aren’t quite socially acceptable.
Admittedly, there’s a paradox—he’s saying something that he “doesn’t tell people very much” in an ESPN interview—we’ve not talking about a gigantic stigma. Still, I don’t think he’d talk about a fondness for NASCAR racing in the same way.
The funny thing is that car racing is also a technical subject. As Anderegg points out in the “Nerds” book, it’s strange that some intellectual and technical pursuits get a “pass” on being “nerdy” because they are associated with masculinity, such as playing fantasy football or being a car mechanic.
I wonder how much anti-intellectualism is separate motivation, and how much it’s an effort to enforce gender roles.
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person’s interests. The other meaning concerns a person’s social skills. GSP calls himself a nerd because of his interests. After calling himself a nerd, he makes a half-baked attempt at presenting himself as socially inept (“I have a hard time finding a girlfriend”), but we don’t have to believe him.
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word “nerd” to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word “nerd” have in fact started to separate in English.
If “nerd” once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either “socially inept person” or “person with a keen interest in an unusual topic”, without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here’s proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
If all this is correct, then the word “nerd” is in fact evolving away from the concept that rolled the two ideas into one, i.e., the idea of keen interest in an unusual topic and the idea of social ineptness.
Constant:
The real puzzle is not about the current meaning of the term, but why the former is normally taken to imply the latter. The existence of a widely used term that covers both meanings is just evidence that this connection is widely made, not an explanation of why it exists.
[Edit: the rest of this comment is based on an incorrect reading. See the replies below.]
I think your analysis is wrong. GSP (or at least the public persona he’s presenting) is clearly an example that defies the stereotype. Yet because he fulfills one element of the stereotype, GSP seems unable to conceive of the possibility that he might be an exception to the other ones (or, alternatively, believes that claiming to be such would be absurd), and feels obliged to present himself as someone who indeed conforms to it wholly.
This is evidence of the tremendous strength of the stereotype: since GSP displays “nerdy” intellectual interests, then despite the extreme appearance to the contrary, somehow he still must have a nerdy essence that makes him unattractive to women and ostracized by the cool and popular social circles.
(I should add that the word “stereotype” is nowadays often used with strong moralistic meaning, but I’m using it as a neutral technical term for heuristics for categorizing people based on statistical discrimination.)
Actually, he doesn’t believe that being a nerd means his social skills are so poor he can’t attract a woman. He believes (perhaps accurately) that he’s only interested in the relatively rare women who share his nerd interests.
What’s interesting is that he associates being a nerd with having difficulty finding partners, even though the connection isn’t by way of poor social skills.
Interesting. So it looks more like it’s a new meaning all the way down the line, as he uses the term. He has even supplied a new explanation (pickiness) for the old phenomenon (having a limited set of friends), which was previously explained by ineptness. It was easy to be confused because he is describing the familiar outward pattern of the nerd, even though he has a new explanation for it. Genuine linguistic evolution here?
You’re right. On a more careful reading, my interpretation was incorrect.
You may be right but let me add to my argument.
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
People have limited self knowledge and are constantly rationalizing what they just did or just said. Their self explanations are not definitive.
I believe your argument requires that he has in fact mislabeled himself on the basis of an imperfect match between himself and the word. “nerd”, and that he followed up by confabulating to make himself a better fit for the definition.
In contrast, I argue that the word is in flux (as is the related stereotype), that he is correctly applying a new meaning, but that he misunderstands his own statement. I think self-misunderstanding is commonplace, so I find thus to be a natural, unforced possibility, rather than a contrivance. I think that the meaning of the word “nerd” has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
Added: I propose ostensive definition as the key mechanism of change.
Step 1: “a nerd is a socially inept person with special interests...”.
Step 2: …”like Bill Gates.”
Step 3: “a nerd is a person like Bill Gates...”
Step 4: ”...who is famous for becoming fantastically wealthy through his special interests.”
From Step 1 to step 2, examples are generated. From step 3 to step 4, the examples yield a changed definition because what was most conspicuous about the examples has changed.
Constant:
I agree that my comment was incorrect, and based on an inaccurate reading of what GSP said. Taking that into account, you’re probably right that he is applying only the “obscure interests” meaning to himself.
That said, I don’t think the general use of the word has lost much, if any of its negative connotations, nor that the underlying stereotypes are becoming any weaker. You say:
But notice that the public perception of Bill Gates is still in accordance with the full “nerd” stereotype. Watch the joke video that he made when he retired. What it clearly shows is that within the ranks of the rich, powerful, and famous, his position is very much like the position of a nerd kid among his more popular school peers: he is proud just because they’re giving him some attention, and views this as a boost to his status. (Consider how unimaginable the opposite would be!) Certainly, despite all the money, power, and fame, nobody ever considered Gates as someone to admire and emulate in terms of style or social behavior, and not to even mention his complete lack of sex-symbol status.
Moreover, even if the nerd stereotype acquired some positive connotations in terms of good career prospects during the eighties and nineties, this trend could only have been downward for the last decade or so, considering that both the economic and general social status of tech professions has been going down ever since the dot-com crash. The ongoing deindustrialization is increasingly catching up even with white-collar technical work.
I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka “Wasp”, the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she’s obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it’s a very different kind of disconnect from the “nerd” disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu’s Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she’s no goth, doesn’t go around in black leather, but she’s still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it’s Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there’s the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd—and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I’m out. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I’m starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I’ve only seen a couple of the HP movies—is Hermione’s character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she’s presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Being disliked for knowing so much is not the same thing as being socially inept. But my recollection is that she was attacked primarily for being muggle-born, and more by Draco Malfoy than by anybody else. It’s been a while.
In the first movie Emma Watson was very much like the drawn character, becoming markedly less so in the later movies, maybe in part because the movies were made every two years or so, which meant that the actors quickly outgrew their characters. But the movies have been, I think, very faithful to the books as far as story and character go, within the necessary constraints.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
Yes, those were definitely nerds in the bad old dual studious/inept sense. However, Willow Rosenberg was much more central to the series. Wikipedia actually says, “Willow is a shy and nerdy girl with little confidence,” and, “Willow is presented as a bookish nerd with considerable computer skills, dowdily dressed and easily intimidated by more popular girls in school.”
buffy.wikia.com says, “Willow started out as a meek and largely unassertive computer nerd, but eventually grew to be a powerful and authoritative individual,” and, “In her early years at high school, Willow is a shy, naïve nerd with a light, risqué sense of humor. A member of the Math, Science, and Computer clubs, she is the person to go to for tutoring help. Willow is ridiculed by her more popular classmates, including cheerleaders Cordelia Chase and Harmony Kendall.” It includes the corporate explanation of the shift in Willow:
Which suggests that Whedon wanted to sustain Willow as more of a nerd in all respects, but the suits said no, and so this is why Willow became more of a Hermione and less of a female Anthony Michael Hall. Harry Potter came out in 1997 and Buffy (TV series) came out in the same year. Even though both the HP books and Buffy continued for many years, the characters were sufficiently established early on that my guess is that there was minimal influence.
Thinking of female nerds, The Mummy’s librarian pops into my head. Played by Rachel Weisz. Some degree of social awkwardness, but not really all that much. Definitely studious—knows enough to wake the antagonist.
“Dowdily dressed”? Not consistently.
After 10 years, I still remember the impression a succession of dresses in season 3 made on me.
In light of Whedon’s remark, it looks like you can thank corporate headquarters for the memorable succession of dresses. But Hannigan was smoking hot whatever she wore.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I’m not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a “computer genius” character having just about every stereotypical “nerdy” characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his “nerdy” computer knowledge (he’s depicted as living in his parents’ basement in his thirties).
While that computer hacker lived in his mom’s basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.
For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom’s basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop’s daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.
It’s easy to charge that I’ve been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.
I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:
Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with “most prevalent in the 70s and 80s”. Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary’s history of the word “nerd” appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word “nerd” accrued the intellectual element to its earlier “dud” meaning—and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article’s claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.
But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.
You’re right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.
On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to “nerdy” kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.
This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely “nerdy” and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.
The explanation from the rising popularity of tech does seem highly plausible.
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn’t do so in a believable way, so I’m not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the “nerd” stereotype.
The “hacker” archetype is a bit different. “Hacker” incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long’s Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long’s character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It’s much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn’t good at math and his mind “doesn’t work that way.” Justin Long’s Mac character is a textbook “Hollywood Nerd.”
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
To avoid getting far off track, citing these fictions was in order to make a point about the changing meaning of “nerd”. With that in mind, look at what the article you linked to says about real nerds:
That’s agreeing with my thesis about what the concept of “nerd” has come to mean recently. The article writer thinks that it is distinguishing real nerds (who are distinguished only by intense interest in niche topics) from Hollywood Nerds (who are type 1 or type 2). But if you simply look at a dictionary (none of them have been updated to reflect the new meaning—the latest shift is too recent), the word “nerd” did not just mean someone with an interest in niche topics. By (earlier) definition, a nerd was not “of average looks and social skills”. The word has been gutted of its earlier meaning and emotional impact, making it no longer, or at least less, painful for someone to call themselves a nerd.
The American Heritage Dictionary traces the meaning of “nerd” through time. In 1957, meant “square”, which, looking it up, meant conventional or old-fashioned or opposed to current trends. Nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. Then in 1970, an uninteresting person, a “dud”. Again, nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. At some point, the concept of “nerd” gained the element of keen and single-minded interest in niche and especially technical topics. while retaining the “dud” element. But now we see, in the article you link to, that “nerd” has, at least for some, dropped the “dud” element and retained only the (relatively new) element of interest in niche topics.
I agree with you that the concept of “nerd” has been slowly changing, but I think it’s still pretty bad.
The nerd stereotype is alive and thriving in the big bang theory.
Yup. And there are other examples. Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, another current comedy. But Big Bang Theory is much more hard core. However Big Bang Theory is, I think, not the cultural benchmark that The Breakfast Club was.
Edit: just thinking further, it occurs to me that Albert Einstein, with his dress and his hair, must have greatly informed the cultural stereotype of the badly dressed genius. Doctor Who is I think a sometimes “cool” version of Einstein. I think there’s some overlap between the absentminded professor (as in flubber), the nutty professor (as in Jerry Lewis), Dick Van Dyke of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the nerd. We have the high intelligence, the being lost in one’s interests, the social awkwardness and obliviousness, and so on. Shared among the absentminded professor types (informed, whether justly or unjustly I don’t know, by the common idea of Einstein) and also the nerds.
I’ll take your word for the cultural benchmark, it didn’t make as much impact on the rest of the world as it did the states (I hadn’t heard of it until 1997)
Speaking of 1985, and crazy scientists you get Doc Brown. Now he was a cool version of Einstein, hair and all. Well actually Einstein is probably considered fairly cool for a scientist, the crazy tongue photo gives the impression he didn’t take himself too seriously.
Darwin vs Einstein, who is cooler?
Yes, it’s things like these that I find bizarre.
In the meantime, I read the chapters of Anderegg’s book you cited above. I find his thesis very interesting, but as always in the history of ideas, it’s hard to estimate the relative significance of particular cultural tropes, especially since I know little about all the other factors that could have influenced the development of this characteristic modern American stereotype. I’ve put his book on my reading list, so I’ll probably have more comments when I get to reading it.
The link to Emerson’s speech is in my post.
You can read the relevant chapter in Google Books. The link I gave should take you to the history chapter starting with Ichabod Crane.
In general it’s a good book, but it has some wrong assumptions and moralizing.
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate may actually be culturally localized.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
NancyLebovitz:
I don’t see why these specific patterns of behavior would seem “absolutely innate” even looking only at the U.S. There are lots of non-nerdy people with high intelligence, and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t excel in “nerdy” professions if they chose to enter them in large numbers. In my opinion, the main reason why non-nerdy smart people go mainly into non-technical professions is that in the American society, technical professions, on the whole, offer relatively low status considering the demands they impose.
Where I lived in Europe (various places in ex-Yugoslavia), we’ve never really had anything comparable to the American notion of “geeks” and “nerds.” It’s hard to find even an approximate translation for these words which would have all the connotations of high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things.
We do have words that denote these qualities separately, or for people who put excessive effort into success in school while lacking real-life skills and smarts, or who achieve high grades thanks to cramming rather than smarts and talent, etc., etc., and various terms of this sort are used to translate “nerd/geek” in different contexts. But there is no accurate translation, simply because there is no striking correlation between all these attributes. (That said, in recent years some of the American “geek” culture has been making inroads, but even what exists of it is still not comparable, since there is both less social nerdiness involved and much less correlation with interest, let alone high achievement, in science and engineering.)
Partly this is because technical professions have higher relative status, so they attract plenty of intelligent people who are not at all deficient in social skills. The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people’s innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in “geeky” social circles and activities, since they can’t find them anywhere else.
All that said, this situation still does not mean that success in courting women is more evenly distributed among men. On the contrary: the attention of attractive women, and the overwhelming part of casual sex that takes place, is still restricted to the minority of men who are attractive by pretty much the same criteria as anywhere else. It’s just that you’ll find many more such men (as well as less attractive, but still far from nerdy men) among people doing technical professions and having various intellectual interests that are stereotyped as “geeky” in the U.S.
Vladimir M asserts that in Europe, “technical professions have higher relative status”.
That agrees with my experience. My mom used to say that my engineer father would have higher status if he lived in the old country. Also, when letters from Europe arrived for my dad, his name was sometimes prefaced with the honorific “Ing.” which is short for “Ingenieur”, which means “Engineer”.
How is the educational system different?
As you may know, there’s been a lot of interest lately in the US about how to lessen or eliminate bullying in schools—there’ve been a number of suicides lately resulting from years of severe bullying.
The only structural cause I’ve seen suggested (as distinct from recommendations of active anti-bullying programs) is the high emphasis on competitive athletics, and in particular, athletic competitions between schools.
The other question is whether there’s a process of bullying/ostracism in European schools which is aimed at other sorts of people.
NancyLebovitz:
I don’t have anything resembling a complete theory of these differences. It’s certainly not about some clearly identifiable and straightforward organizational aspects that could be reformed in a planned way, and there are definitely deep cultural differences involved.
One organizational difference that seems significant, though, is that I went through a system that had tracking done in such a way that smart kids of all sorts ended up separated from the not so bright ones, but largely mixed together, without being allowed to segregate by electing different coursework. (You had a choice of high schools with different curriculums, but everyone within the same high school had to learn the same, usually eclectic mix of things.) This did seem to create an optimal environment for introverted smart kids to grow up without being exposed to bullying (which was unheard of in the high school I went to), and giving them less inclination and opportunity to self-segregate into “nerdy” cliques.
There is bullying/ostracism however it isn’t as formalised.
I would be tempted to blame the sports. Simply it creates an in group of people that are considered higher status. There are pep rallies to them, with beautiful girls cheering them on, that has to create an inflated sense of worth/superiority/difference.
So they persecute the out group, the geeks, to signal their in-group ness and preserve their sense of superiority. I suppose it is similar to the stanford prison experiment. Raise one group above another and that group seems to persecute the other.
It’s definitely not the sports that do it. You may be right about all the rest of the stuff that is associated with sport over there. Cheerleaders? That’s not just in the teen movies right, you actually have them?
Does being a nerd and a good athlete seem out of place in that culture? Come to think of it there is a separate group for ‘band nerds’ too if my consumption of low grade entertainment is anything to go by. I wouldn’t know where to put myself!
Yeah by sports I meant the importance given to it. In comparison we don’t have such things as sports scholarships (irrespective of academic talent, which I think is called an entrance scholarship) for prestigious universities. Does Australia?
I’m a Pom, so my exposure to American culture is mainly fictional in nature as well. I’ve seen a number of documentaries as well though. The BBC loves analysing the US.
Heck no. University sports here are relatively obscure. They are there for students who enjoy them but they are approximately status neutral.
High school cheerleaders at a game.
This was actually a little harder to find than cheerleading competitions. It’s morphed into its own sport.
Athletes don’t do all the bullying—not even most of it, I think.
It’s possible that the high emphasis on sports poisons the whole atmosphere.
NancyLebovitz:
That’s not a necessary implication of whpearson’s theory. Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can’t achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.
I didn’t go myself through the American school system, though, so I have no idea how well this hypothesis holds water.
I didn’t go through the American school system either but your theory seems to match with general observable tendencies. Bullying and crude social aggression isn’t an indicator of high status so much as an indicator of ‘medium high status that requires effort to maintain’. This is why I make sure I never work for an insecure boss.
Define what you mean by geeky...
If you mean people that don’t like to party, then from my experience they are doing science and engineering and probably some humanities as well. They also generally co-exist quite happily with the party-ers, at least at University level.
I’ve just realised how much we have a cultural one way mirror. I’ve seen fictional depictions of fraternities, keg standing, hazing etc, however you probably haven’t seen what a European rock concert is like. Which is generally non-violent, unless you get in the mosh pit.
I say European, but in some ways I have less idea of what mainland European social life is like than American.
Vladimir_M’s “high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things” is good enough except that I’d add lack of femininity to the list.
One horrifying feature of American culture in the 50s was that intelligence was considered not masculine and not feminine, and since everyone was supposed to be one or the other, being visibly intelligent had a social cost. In my opinion, a major (but incomplete) change in this happened when it was clear that people could make money in IT. I’m inclined to think the Flynn effect is also taking hold.
From a science fiction convention: A women mentions that sometimes she feels she’s just got to do something different with her hair, and fannish women are apt to look at her as though she’s crazy.
Historical note: I think that identifying interest in dressing up with being effeminate is a modern weirdness. The only culture I can think of where men and women who could afford to didn’t get about equally elaborate and showy was colonial America, and in that case, the men were dressier.
Afaik, American rock concerts are mostly non-violent, but this is very much second hand. Anyone have more information?
Every mainstream rock concert I’ve ever been to in the US has been entirely non-violent, modulo the occasional and mostly unrelated edge cases that arise when you get a thousand drunk people together. Even metal and punk concerts aren’t violent outside of the mosh pit, and I’m not sure that properly counts as violence, being consensual and generally not aimed at causing injury.
Sounds a lot like the European case, in other words.