The term nerd has no clear origin, but most sources agree that it is from the '50s. The AHD, for instance, states that:
- The first known occurrence of the word nerd, undefined but illustrated, dates from 1950 and is found in If I Ran the Zoo, a children's book by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel). The book's narrator lists various imaginary creatures that he would keep in 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 nerd is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry.)
Most dictionaries give two definition of nerd, the more general and derogatory one is always the first:
- A foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious. (ODO)
while, the related but probably more common and less negative one, always comes as second:
- a person who is extremely interested in one subject, especially computers, and knows a lot of facts about it. (Cambridge Dictionary)
Checking with Ngram it appears that "nerd" has become a very popular term only from the '80s, much more than "computer nerd" for instance.
Questions:
What made "nerd" a popular therm from the '80s? Was it its original derogatory meaning or the more recent technology related one?
Has "nerd" still a negative connotation or has "tech specialist" nuance of the term outgrown the original meaning?
Best Answer
Dictionary discussions of 'nerd/nurd'
The term nerd (or nurd) doesn't appear in Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960), but this entry appears in Wentworth & Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, supplemented edition (1967):
J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1997) propounds the If I Ran the Zoo theory but also floats an alternative influence that is even earlier. Here is Lighter's entry, including its earliest antecedent cites and same-sense citations:
According to the Muppet Wiki article on Mortimer Snerd, the dim-bulb ventriloquist dummy debuted on The Chase & Sanborne Hour (a radio program) in 1938. You can see him in action in the movie You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939) and on an unidentified TV show (1950).
Max Cryer, Common Phrases: And the Amazing Stories Behind Them (2010) views the theory that Seuss is the source of nerd in its modern slang sense as being beyond question:
A glossary entry for nurd in Raymond Buckley, When Better Women Are Made (1967) as this entry for nurd:
Database matches for 'nerd/nurd'
Glendon Swarthout, Where the Boy Are (1960), cited in the Lighter entry for nerd above, reads in context as follows [combined snippets]:
The earliest valid match for nurd in an Elephind search is from "24 Games Open IM Basketball," in the [Washington, D.C.] Hoya (December 10, 1959), Georgetown University's student newspaper:
And from Carl Langley, "Frat Chat: IFC Leadership Conference, Rho Tau on Agenda for This Weekend," in the [Richmond, Virginia] Collegian (March 10, 1961), the student newspaper of the University of Richmond:
The earliest Elephind match for "a nerd" is from Deb Stoddard, "Fastly Foibles," in the [State College, Pennsylvania] Daily Collegian (January 6, 1965), the student newspaper of Pennsylvania State University:
The use of snerd as a descriptive term occurs in "Edgar Bergen Broadcasts from Racquet Club: Celebrities Guests on Last Show," in the [Palm Springs, California] Desert Sun (February 24, 1955) but not elsewhere in the Elephind database in that capacity during the 1950s and 1960s:
Conclusions
The slang term nerd/nurd has been use since the late 1950s at least as student slang referring to a boring, conventional, unimaginative, tedious, twerpy person who is averse to doing anything the least bit wild or daring.
The connection of that term to the term nerd in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (as a nonsense name of one of the many imaginary creatures that Gerald McGrew would popular his zoo with) is far from obvious. It bears noticing that Dr. Seuss wrote quite a few books that focused on page after page of exotic animals and their extraordinary habits, including If I Ran the Circus, Happy Birthday to You (which is set in Katroo, the alleged home [rendered as Ka-Troo] of the It-Kutch, Preep, Proo, Nerkle, Nerd, and Seersucker in If I Ran the Zoo), On Beyond Zebra, McElligot's Pool, Scrambled Eggs Super, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
Under the circumstances it would be rather surprising if none of Seuss's made-up creature names didn't also appear as slang words. The trick is to identify a direct connection between the word from Seuss and the word as used by (in this case) college kids, hot-rodders, and beach blanket bingoers.
In this regard, I am very skeptical of the claimed paternity. You can see what the Nerd looks like in If I Ran the Zoo at 9:12 of this YouTube video; and Max Cryer's gloss on its appearance notwithstanding, it doesn't look particularly nerdy to me. In fact the closest passing resemblance it bears to a humanoid is to Yosemite Sam, who isn't a nerd by any rational measure.
Another problem for the Seuss source theory is that most of the early Google Books and Elephind database matches that I found for the slang term spell the word nurd; so proponents of the Seuss hypothesis must argue that people remembered the name nerd and what the creature looked like from a spread it shared with five other made-up animals in a book full of other made-up animals with outlandish names, but most of those people didn't remember how Dr Seuss spelled it.
I am much more inclined to accept that the name of Edgar Bergen's second-banana ventriloquist's dummy, Mortimer Snerd, influenced the emergence of nerd as a slang term for a kind of lame doofus (which Snerd certainly was). But even that possibility is far from obvious.
The pool of single-syllable English-sounding words that seem cute or appealing or appropriately disparaging for slang coinages is perhaps smaller than people tend to think. Consider the foam material dubbed Nerf, which, according to its Wikipedia entry, is an acronym for non-expanding recreational foam. Although that sense of Nerf originated in 1969 or 1970, Wadsworth & Flexner's 1960 Dictionary of American Slang includes an entry for a very different kind of nerf:
Regrettably, Wadsworth & Flexner left the etymology of nerfing bar untraced—although a now-obsolete meaning of nerf in use until the 16th century or so was "sinew"—so who knows. Anyway, nerf and Nerf arose within 15 years of each other and yet appear to be completely unrelated. I would not be shocked if the same turned out to be true of Dr. Seuss's zoo-ready nerd and the socially inept nerd/nurd of the late 1950s to the present.