The headline of a 2021 New York Times article made a bold claim: President Biden is a geek. “Watch Geek in Chief,” to be exact. The president’s love of luxury timepieces (he wore a Rolex to the inauguration) caught the eye of Styles’ desk.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “geek” dates to the late 19th century, when it was American slang for a “stupid, obnoxious” or “worthless” person. By 1919, a “geek” had become a circus performer who performed grotesque acts such as biting off animals’ heads. In 1946, The Times reviewed a novel called “Nightmare Alley,” about a man who attends a carnival and finds out “why geeks bite off chickens’ heads.”
From this definition a more modern one emerged. By the late 20th century, the “nerd” had become a social outcast, though not a spectacle: “an overly studious, unsociable student” or “an unsociable person abnormally devoted to a particular pursuit,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Benjamin Nugent, author of the book “American Nerd” and a Times article on “nerds,” suggested that the meanings of “geek” and “nerd” converged in the 1970s. (He cited William Safire’s 1980 article in Language Theory as an early example, in which Safire wrote that on some college campuses, “pencil nerd” was a synonym for “nerd.”) In an interview, Nugent said the two words became linked because they were both originally “insults for unattractive people.”
Perhaps because of its mean-spirited nature, the word “geek” didn’t appear much in The Times, and when it did, it was usually in articles about high schools. A 1977 article noted that at one high school, there was a widespread belief that “anyone who boycotts the prom for feminist or philosophical reasons is probably a fake — a cheapskate or a geek who can’t get a date.” In a review of the 1984 film “Sixteen Candles,” the writer described Molly Ringwald’s uptight protagonist as “being pursued by people known as geeks.”
In 1987, artist and cartoonist Gary Panter, quoted in The Times, described Pee-wee Herman as “the new emerging nerd, or the triumphant nerd, the kind of guy who nobody talked to in the ’50s and now is at the height of fashion.” He was right. As the decades passed, “nerd” gained a certain social status that defied the very definition of the word.
Nugent said that just as “nerd” has become associated with “technical and engineering ability,” so too has “geek.” “The word has come to describe how useful, powerful and desirable people who engage in non-normative behaviors are,” he added.
In 2019, former New York Times editor Merrill Pearlman wrote in Columbia Journalism Review that the verb form of “geek” also helped dispel the word’s negative history, citing “geek up” and “geek out,” which were computer-related in the 1990s. But the slang has spread. “To be obsessed with something means to be obsessed with detail, apparently to an abnormal degree, and to enjoy it,” explained a 2005 New York Times opinion piece. Now, you can be obsessed with computers, but also with cars, music, or, in Biden’s case, watches.
Today, being a “nerd” or a “nerd” is considered a source of pride, said Maya Phillips, a Times arts and culture critic who explored “nerd culture” for a book she published in 2022. She said in an interview that when she was a child, being called a “nerd” or a “nerd” was “derogatory.”
But by the mid-2000s, “it became a symbol of someone who was ahead of their time and understood mainstream pop culture tropes,” she says.
