a brief exposition on social language
What is the difference between the oft replaced words 'dork', 'geek', and 'nerd'? Are they three different flavors describing the same kind of person, or three distinct ideas deserving three different domains of meaning?
One proposal is that they describe an evolution of development in terms of inappropriate involvement and absorption into a topic. Another is that they are a kind of hierarchy of external acceptability. Yet another claims that they are all coexistent in people and only express some kind of mixing or predominance between different, non-exclusive traits. A final (by no means exhaustive) possibility is that they are a measure of self-definition, only useful to those subjected to such labels.
Without addressing these concerns, we can affirm the following:
'dork', 'geek', and 'nerd' all imply some social deficiency due to ignorance of certain societal norms.
'dork' implies a naive oblivious blindness to more critical social patterns.
'nerd' implies a blitheness due to excessive immersion in another culture, leading to a replacement of norms in a larger social group with that of the subgroup by habit.
'geek' connotes 'nerd', but to a greater degree, such that subgroup norms are internalized and generate emergent 'nerd'-like behavior, but without supervised learning.
It is never good to be a 'dork' but the others are negotiable.
One proposal is that they describe an evolution of development in terms of inappropriate involvement and absorption into a topic. Another is that they are a kind of hierarchy of external acceptability. Yet another claims that they are all coexistent in people and only express some kind of mixing or predominance between different, non-exclusive traits. A final (by no means exhaustive) possibility is that they are a measure of self-definition, only useful to those subjected to such labels.
Without addressing these concerns, we can affirm the following:
'dork', 'geek', and 'nerd' all imply some social deficiency due to ignorance of certain societal norms.
'dork' implies a naive oblivious blindness to more critical social patterns.
'nerd' implies a blitheness due to excessive immersion in another culture, leading to a replacement of norms in a larger social group with that of the subgroup by habit.
'geek' connotes 'nerd', but to a greater degree, such that subgroup norms are internalized and generate emergent 'nerd'-like behavior, but without supervised learning.
It is never good to be a 'dork' but the others are negotiable.