Just saw this article featuring interesting facts about some Dr. Seuss books. But in it, the writer notes:
This sounds highly dubious to me. Anyone out there with an OED that can verify/disprove?
Hijack:
This item, however, I believe:
OED’s first citation is from 1951:
So if “nerd” really is in If I Ran the Zoo then you should give the OED folks a heads-up.
-FrL-
ETA Here’s the passage from Zoo
Not clearly (indeed I think clearly not) a use of the same word “nerd” that’s under discussion in this thread. So never mind on giving OED a heads-up.
According to my American Heritage Dictionary which I have handy:
The word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Suess’s If I Ran 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, 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 regular column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerd–a square, any explanation needed?” Many of the terms defined in this “ABC” are unmistakable Americanisms, such as hep, ick, and jazzy, as is the gloss “square,” the current meaning of nerd.
The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the United States in 1970 in Current Slang: “Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits…An uninteresting person, a ‘dud.’”
Authorities disagree on whether the two nerds–Dr. Seuss’s small creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mail–are the same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain Dr. Suess is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, has restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”
Even if it’s not clearly the same word, it would be useful to be added to OED’s database, partly because the current use of “nerd” may be derived from that Dr Seuss quotation. If I were researching the word for a dictionary, I’d be grateful for that citation.
(And I’d want it under the other nonce words, such as “preep” and “proo”, in case they ever come into general usage.)
What, you never heard that famous crunk song, “closer than my preeps you are to me”?
The OED undoubtedly has this. It’s in all modern dictionaries and the Online Etymology Dictionary shows it.
That also indicates that both Seuss and others may have picked up on the similar sounding term already in use.
You need to understand how far behind the OED is on modern terminology. They’re prepping for a third edition that will be all electronic, but until that finally appears they’re not a good source for recent etymology.
I’ve seen some webpages that claim that the word was used in the 1960s or so at my alma mater, Rensselaer, but spelled nurd or knurd (i.e., drunk spelled backward).
Except that the OED is ahead of you on that one. It is true that the online version doesn’t include the Dr Seuss reference as its earliest example, no doubt for the simple reason that it isn’t actually an example of the word being used in that sense. But the entry does mention it as one of the possible origins under its discussion of the etymology.
You can say that again. A few years ago, a science-fiction group was doing legwork for first usages of speculative-fiction words for the OED. One of the words on their list, that they wanted a confirmed first usage for, was “hobbit-hole”. Which first appears, of course, on page 1 of The Hobbit, and can’t very well have appeared any earlier than that. If the OED is having trouble citing a word coined in a book written by one of their own editors, they’ve got some serious problems.
I hope you’ve seen the result, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, by Jeff Prucher.
Hobbit is not an entry, interestingly.
For the problems and omissions of the OED, see Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED, by Charlotte Brewer.
Since Tolkien’s fictional works are fantasy rather than science fiction, they may not be in scope for Prucher’s work.
My–probably incorrect–theory has nerd being derived from “Brainerd”. A more obvious term for an over-achieving student being “brain”, this could have been embellished to “brainerd” or “brain nerd” and thus “nerd”.
Disney’s The Absent Minded Professor starred Fred MacMurray as “Professor Brainerd” who was obsessed with scientific formulas to the exclusion of his social life. But given that it was released in 1960, that movie could not have been the original inspiration.
Another theory has the term being derived from Mortimer Snerd, a doofus character created by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Even though Mr. Snerd is nothing like a “brain”, the use of “nerd” in peer culture emphasizes awkwardness and dorkiness, so a connection could still be drawn.
::excuse hijack:: Ah, Dewey, how seldom anybody uses the name “Rensselaer” (or even spells it correctly), or has any clue as to what RPI is. I never attended, but worked there at one time.
You didn’t read APB’s cite:
Brainerd seems more like a back-formation than the originating term.
Entries include fantastic n.; fantastic adj.; and fantasy n.
Inside science fiction, sf always includes fantasy unless the terms are specifically separated.
Hobbit probably wasn’t included, now that I think about it, because its use is basically confined to one writer, while all the terms that were included are used by many and backed up by a multitude of varied cites. A lot of fantasy terms are unique to their originator (or taken from the real world rather than coined) while sf writers tend to borrow language to create what James Gunn first termed a consensus future. (Which also isn’t in the book.)
Better examples might be entries for elf or dwarf or wizard or something.
Okay, I know you’re a science fiction author. I still can’t help asking for a citation for this. It’s just that I’ve never noticed this usage.
-FrL-
You’ve never noticed that something like the Hugo Awards, given at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) by members of the World Science Fiction Society, are award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy?
The word nerd existed long before Dr. Suez. It was the name of a game. So where he may be the first to use it for a person, it is a borrowed word, not an original.
Was he the guy that engineered the Canal?