PC Users Find It’s Not PC to Use Nerd Word
Are nerds an oppressed minority? Is nerd itself a slur?
The issue isn’t sparking the kind of uproar that Ted Danson did by donning blackface to roast Whoopi Goldberg. But computerdom’s great epithet has sparked some flaming e-mail at a Silicon Valley computer publication.
One middle-aged man connected with the magazine had evidently had it up to his pocket protector. Firing off charged messages to colleagues, he likened the term to a racial slur, contending, in effect, that in the world of PCs, it is no longer politically correct to use the “N” word.
“A few were debating this, mostly by e-mail, which is what nerds, er, those people, the technically inclined, do,” said David Diamond, managing editor of San Mateo-based Unixworld, which covers the world of high-powered computer operating systems and whose readers include you-know-whats.
The controversy at the magazine cooled after the expression old guard nerds was removed from a headline on an upcoming story. But the issue arises just when the technologically advantaged seem to be most in the driver’s seat, what with all the to-do over information highways.
Indeed, many fully empowered nerds wear the appellation proudly. Canyon Co., which creates Windows and multimedia software, drew a large, eclectic crowd to a recent Nerd Networking bash at a San Francisco hotel.
“This is the true ‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ ” exulted software designer Alan Cooper. “Today, the guys who are successful are the guys who have control of information. It used to be the jocks had the power. They’re not important anymore. The guys born to master information are the new ruling elite.”
Case in point: Bill Gates, bespectacled founder of Microsoft Corp. and a classic nerd. With a fortune estimated at $6.7 billion, he’s now one of the world’s richest men. And he’s even engaged.
At Rent-a-Nerd, a Vienna, Va., firm that trouble-shoots computer problems, founder Mike Wyckoff’s business card reads “Head Nerd.” He and his 40 consultants charge their 300 clients nationwide $1 a minute for help. “People seem to notice the name,” Wyckoff said. “It’s been magnificent.”
Of course, not all computer wizards are comfortable being nerds. Unixworld products editor Lisa Stapleton, who majored in applied math and physics at UC Berkeley, has “not only been a nerd, but a female nerd, which is even worse.” She would vote to scrap nerd in the magazine, but when her husband, a programmer, fouls up a home plumbing repair, she reserves the right to say, “What a nerd thing to do.”
Historically, nerds certainly have been fair game. Homer Simpson uses the term pejoratively. And to computer columnist Guy Kawasaki, a nerd is anyone who considers Compuserve a dating service. “Neat little anal-retentive men with penchants for short-sleeved shirts,” writes Robert X. Cringely, another columnist.
Author Dan Gookin, an avowed computer nerd, nonetheless engages in some negative stereotyping in his popular books, “PCs for Dummies” and “DOS for Dummies.” With a pedantic finger pointing skyward, a pencil-necked cartoon nerd with big glasses and bad hair pops up every few pages to nag readers about technical “drivel.”
Just what is a nerd? Gookin’s “Illustrated Computer Dictionary for Dummies” describes a nerd as “someone who is very wrapped up in computers--and often him or herself,” and adds, “Nerds include those who love the computers because nothing else loves them back.”
Gookin is at pains to distinguish nerds from “dweebs, whose idea of being socially acceptable is brushing their teeth and applying deodorant,” and he dismisses nerds’ rights activists who might take umbrage.
“The Dictionary of Computer Slang,” by Tony Thorne, defines nerd as “a gormless, vacuous, tedious and/or ineffectual person.” Thorne says the word goes back to the late 1960s or early ‘70s, when members of surfing and hot-rodding cliques used it to refer to outsiders considered feeble or conformist. An earlier spelling was nurd.
Lexicographers at the American Heritage Dictionary contend that it first appeared in 1950 in the Dr. Seuss book “If I Ran the Zoo”: “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo and Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” The Seuss nerd, according to the dictionary, was “a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.”
Nerds these days aren’t what they used to be. The techies who grew up with computers have gotten older and gotten a life. Steve Jobs, the wizard who co-founded Apple Computer Inc., has a family now. Other techies, eschewing Ding Dongs and Pepsis, have traded all-night code-writing sessions for late-night feedings and diaper changes.
Besides, being a nerd can take its toll. Jan Bottorff, a software developer from San Jose, insists that despite his “nerd name” and “nerd watch” (a Casio with built-in calculator), “I’m not a nerd anymore. I gave it up. I got tired of being stereotyped.”
Nowadays, Bottorff spends more time tending his inner nerd: “I’m into personal growth workshops, personal encounter groups in the nude and heavily into fire walking.”
Diamond, of Unixworld, said no one aside from staff members has ever quibbled with the use of nerd , but Fred Gault, Canyon Co.’s co-founder, said it isn’t a term he’d throw around. “I think it’s something that only nerds can call themselves.”
