Saturday, April 25, 2009

Move Over, Chester

Well, I was feeling guilty about the last entry, and got to wondering if maybe my definition of “nerdy” was off kilter so I looked it up in my handy-dandy American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd Ed. (The real volume – an actual book with paper pages and little black indented tabs with gold letters, mind you. Not the on-line kind.) However, it is over 10-years-old now, so perhaps the meaning has changed, but for some reason I don’t think so…

(Blockquote)
nerd also nurd (nûrd) n. Slang. A person regarded as stupid, socially inept, or unattractive. [Perh. after Nerd , a character in If I Ran the Zoo, by Theodor Seuss Geisel.] – nerd’y adj.
Word History: The word nerd first appears in 1950 in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail back to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (The nerd itself is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.) Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerd – a square, any explanation needed?” Authorities disagree whether Dr. Seuss’s nerd and the Glaswegian nerd are the same word. Some claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word was picked up by five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had applied nerd to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”
(End blockquote)


Just as I thought. (But, I didn’t know about the Dr. Seuss part, which I find fascinating! Wow.)

So now I’m starting to wonder, do they think I look like our 21st President, Chester A. Arthur??

Hey! And what ever happened to me being “The Cool Mom?” Guess I don’t don enough piercings and tattoos. (Oh, the shame – the shame!) In this case, I’d rather be classified a nerd. Thanks Dr. Seuss!

5 comments:

  1. I consider myself a nerd (leaning towards geek) and I'm quite proud of it.

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  2. You, my dear Ksaldria, are a wonderfully eccentric, unique, brilliant, and beautiful! You should be proud! Nerd? Absolutely no way.

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  3. No, no, no. Nerds are cool now! It's all good :D

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. So, since nerds are cool now, does this give me the title of "the nerdy 'cool' mom?" ;-D

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