A matter of definitions

[andrewducker]

[Poll #800358]

Comments

[wychwood]

I tend to think of a dork as someone who is trying to be cool, and failing. Geeks have their own brand of cool by being so cheerfully and openly obsessive, and nerds have no social skills :)

[amberite.livejournal.com]

All terms have become largely interchangeable around here.

"Geek" carries general really-into connotations, "dork" carries some no-social-skills connotations (but does not usually mean completely without social skills) and "nerd" carries some specific connotations of being into computers, math, and sciences. But these are more accents than absolutes.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Secondary note --

Around here when referring to someone who has no social skills, I generally seem to use words "loser" or "troglodyte".

[andrewducker]

I've pretty much picked up my feelings on them from induction. Geekiness is the only one I feel particularly strongly about (with the definition you give), the other two are largely interchangable for me, and I'm very aware that the definitions are ones that vary from place to place.

[andrewducker]

I try to avoid using phrases like "loser" or anything that has a pejorative element to it, because I know that many people with no social skills aren't bad people, they were just badly socialised, or are lacking the bit of brain that understands social situations well.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The geek is a chap in a fairground/freakshow, I believe ;-)

"GWeek" is my favourite expression. It, of course, refers to someone really into Games Workshop products.

and "Geeks have their own brand of cool by being so cheerfully and openly obsessive"

The problem being that non-geeks/geek-admirers would class such a person as a dork ;-)

[andrewducker]

I definitely agree about the latter point. What's cool to one person isn't cool to another.

Which is why I like "nerd" for being someone who is geeky and has no social skills. Because there are people who are geeky and have them (allorin for one).

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. In most cases, I don't use any single-word term at all. I only tend to use single-word terms like this when referring to someone who has done something unpleasant to me directly ("Gaaah, what a loser") or possibly a hypothetical person ("I bet if I put on this corset I'll be followed around by some set of eager troglodytes all con".)

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I was very confused about this whole "geek cool" thing that got bandied about, well, starting in the late 90s.

All I saw was some geeks who happened to be cool (well, debatably in many/most cases of shameful bandwagon-jumping) in addition to being geeks. Geekiness isn't really something that makes someone cool unless you yourself are a geek, and then it's not geek cool, it's just cool.

Of course, the main proponents of this "movement" were of course geeks, presumably hoping to be cool.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of people who are geeky and have social skills. My dad, for example, makes model trains and has an awful lot of books about steam trains, but is perfectly capable in social situations (well, apart from when he's embarrassing, but that's just part of being a parent ;). I think most people have a certain geekishness in some area or another. You just have to get them on the right subject.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

This kind of labelling (in this country, "boffin" is the most used that I heard) is one of the things killing subjects like science, incidentally... certain subjects are seen as being geeky, and people of certain social groups are discouraged from doing them by friends/family....

[andrewducker]

The problem being that coolness was generally in a certain area, for a specific audience. It's a POV thing, and while there's still a mass-market coolness, an awful lot of cool exists only with a niche.

Geekiness is generally only cool to other geeks - what happened in the late 90s seems to be that "using computers" became more mainstream, and so computer use went from being freaky to being ordinary, and so it was possible to be a computer geek _and_ (semi-mainstream) cool, rather than the one precluding the other.

[andrewducker]

Oh, goodness yes. Being smart isn't seen as being a positive thing in an awful lot of places. My grades went staggeringly downwards when I moved from a school where academic achievement was appreciated by the students to one where it was considered bad and wrong.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The "cool geeks" did tend to be not that geeky, in most cases. ie actual geeks would not in fact see them as geeks.

Geek chic would generally include "geeky" clothing on people who were emphatically not geeks.

Although who wouldn't want h0t s3xxx0rz with that Mr Gates....

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Not quite the definition distribution I know. The one I heard was:

dork: no social skills, often geeky or nerdy also, but that's not the thing that makes them dorky. Screech from Saved By The Bell is a dork.
nerd: really into some specifically academic pursuit, like classics or science. Giles from Buffy is a nerd.
geek: really into something in a fanboy/girly way, usually some cult media/pursuit/music/whatev like gaming or Star Trek. Johnathan in Buffy is a geek. (He's also a dork, but that's not the issue)

[andrewducker]

Indeed:
http://blog.monkeymethods.org/2005/01/bill-gates-strikes-pose-for-teen-beat.html

[andrewducker]

Yeah, someone asked me the other day, and I went looking for definitions, with the ones I put above being the most common. But I've seen those ones as well, particularly in an American context.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I still tghink:

geek - wildly into computers, social skills dodgy
nerd: wildly into *something*, not just computers, social skills also possibly dodgy
dorK: social skils dodgy!

[moniqueleigh]

Bingo! That's the definition distro I generally use, too.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Dork means nothing to me, so I ignored it.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

A nerd is really into something, a dork has no social skills, and someone who is really into something and has no social skills is both a dork and a nerd, but not necessarily a geek. And my answers won't fit in your quiz due to the despotism of question three.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of geeks as people slightly consumed by their passions of choice; dorks as quiet people with no social skills or sense of self-worth, and nerds as quiet people with no social skills who are also consumed by their passions of choice :P.