Settling the great geek debate

A while back I was try­ing to fig­ure out the dif­fer­ence between nerds and geeks. My hypoth­e­sis is that the terms are not inter­change­able. I think the mat­ter is set­tled once and for all by this Venn Dia­gram

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    See I’d swap the “Geek” and “nerd” words around. Because “nerd” is most com­monly used to describe peo­ple with a par­tic­u­lar obses­sion who are espe­cially knowl­edge­able on the sub­ject (eg. com­puter nerds, star wars nerds, harry pot­ter nerds, star trek nerds, etc) and the social apti­tude (or lack of) rarely comes into it.


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    I think that too. Nerds you try and avoid at par­ties. Geeks wouldn’t even be at the party…
    (Said by a life­long sci-fi nerd…)


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    Well that set­tled that nicely Nathan. Well done.


  4. 4

    Inci­den­tally, have you ever looked up the ori­gins of the word geek?

    Taken from its Wikipedia arti­cle, though I remem­ber read­ing about men who bit off the heads of live chick­ens for money in an unfor­tu­nate essay I had to ana­lyze for 11th grade AP Lan­guage and Com­po­si­tion last year…

    “The word geek is a slang term, not­ing indi­vid­u­als as “a pecu­liar or oth­er­wise odd per­son, espe­cially one who is per­ceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things includ­ing those of intel­lec­tu­al­ity, elec­tron­ics, etc.“[1] For­merly, the term referred to a car­ni­val per­former often billed as a wild man whose act usu­ally includes bit­ing the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs. The 1976 edi­tion of the Amer­i­can Her­itage Dic­tio­nary included only the def­i­n­i­tion regard­ing geek shows.

    This word comes from Eng­lish dialect geek, geck: fool, freak; from Low Ger­man geck, from Mid­dle Low Ger­man. The root geck still sur­vives in Dutch gek: crazy, and in the Alsa­t­ian word Gick­e­leshut: geek’s hat, used in carnivals.[“


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    See where I am, you hear of “star trek geeks”, “com­puter geeks”, and nerd means more like academic..


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    […] turns out that even an awe­some venn dia­gram won’t solve the nerd v geek debate for some peo­ple. So here you go. Empir­i­cal data. From […]


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    I’m with Sean on this one the divid­ing line between Nerd and Geek to me has always been the usful­ness of the infor­ma­tion or are you are obsesed with. If you are obsessed with physics or know every­thing there is to know about the Court of Henry VIII then you areew a Nerd. Obsessed with Star Wars or know every­thing there is to know about Dun­geons and Drag­ons, you are a Geek…


  8. 8

    […] chart is cour­tesy of the fab web­site http://www.gossipgamers.com and the Geek Matrix is cour­tesy of this SITE. All other images from […]


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Eutychus was a young man who fell to his death because the Apostle Paul preached for too long (Acts 20). I've decided to canonise Eutychus and make him the patron saint of my dalliances around the Internet.

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Recent Comments

Jeff K : I ask people how their Bible reading is going if I get into an awkward convo at church. works a treat.
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KIM : *like* or am i not supposed to put words in stars?? i like it anyway!
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Ben McLaughlin : Heh! That's cool that they were such good sports about it.
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Al Bain : It was your comment that all actions should tick at least one that got me wondering. I think the three categories we have been talking about are helpful. And probably the easiest way to thi
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Nathan Campbell : I don't know that I'm restricting all actions to this trichotomy - because I think "worship" is probably another element that could be added to the Venn diagram (that would overlap heavily with the ot
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al bain : On what scriptural basis are you restricting all actions to this trichotomy?
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Nathan Campbell : How are these, for definitions... Work = Activities for bringing order. Rest = Activities for rejuvenation. Play = Activities for pleasure. I still think the best actions tick two or more of
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KIM : i second the recommendation for communicate jesus -- and can vouch that its blogger is just as adept at real life interaction as he is at facebook!
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Gary Ware : That hollow feeling in the pit of your gut when the fact you've been ripped off is really something isn't it? At least it doesn't involve damage to the car, as well. We had our Tarago front quarter w
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Anika Q : Rather off topic, but I found out today that there is a seminar on the Eutychus passage in Acts in UQ's religious department this Friday at 2. I thought I'd mention it to you, for obvious reasons.
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