Not the little candies…well, ok them too. Why do they call those little candies “nerds.” But more specific here, where does the word “nerd” come from when referring to, you know. A nerd. Like Potsie.
Any English language nerds out there?
Bonus points for a Dopelink to a good “schmuck” query. ;j
Merriam-Webster seems to think it could have stemmed from a character in a 1950 Dr. Seuss book entitled If I Ran The Zoo – it was the name of one of the strange creatures that inhabited said zoo. However, Wiki posits a few alternative theories of origin.
Oh bugger. Is there a code doctor in the house?
Apparently dates back at least as far as 1950 in Dr Seuss’ If I Ran the Zoo, but exact origin unknown:
What do you mean, “a good ‘schmuck’ query”? You mean, an etymological derivation for “schmuck”? Yiddish for “penis”.
For a good “schmuck” query, I suppose this would have been the right person to ask. Alas, however, the chance has passed.
The Dr. Seuss explanation is the one I’ve heard most frequently. The Boston Globe even printed the page from Seuss’ book with a column on the word. I’ve never heard anything about “N.E.R.D/ Labs” and a pocket protector – that sounds wildly unlikely, combining the most obvious aspect of nerdliness.
When I was at MIT in the 1970s, it was often spelled “gnurd”, which is a pretty nerdy thing to do.
Jack Chalker had an artificial animal called a “nerd” in his book Web of the Chozen. Nerds are basically living rubber balls, good for observing the effect of alien biosystems on Earth creatures. The idea is that you expose your nerd to the alien environment, bring it back (in a sealed environment) and observe it. If it dies a horrible death due to alien flesh-eating bacteria, you know better than to send anything except a red-shirt down. Sounds like a good use for a nerd.
The OED says:
What interesting is the date of first cite in the OED:
So you have Seuss creating the word for the book, yet by the next year it was used as slang in Detroit. The big question is whether these were just nonce words – that both forms of nerd were used, but died out and the word gained new life in the 80s.
Well, I’m a queery with a good schmuck, does that count?
I always thought that the concept of “nerd” should include an extra helping of brain, and from what I remember of Potsie, he was quite average in the brain department, if that.
Just to provide local anecdotal data, I recall that I first heard the word nerd when starting college in 1975. I’d never heard it in high school, though I think my years in public school were during a peaceful time and in a peaceful place. There was very little bullying or fighting going on, at all. Maybe once a year two guys would fight and everyone would watch, but I didn’t go to a tough sort of school where people constantly fought. By the same token, there just wasn’t a whole lot of name-calling and put-downs either, so I honestly can’t remember what word was used to describe a nerd. “Dork”, probably.
I learned the word from the Petersen Hot Rod Cartoons/CARtoons/Surftoons line of black & white comic magazines in the '60s. There it was usually spelled “nurd” (and meant simply a dope, without the bookworm connotation), and for years I fought a losing battle to spell it that way.
IMO, there’s really nothing in Seuss’s book to suggest a geek - the nerd in the book looks like any Dr. Seuss fanciful animal, and is given very little text (I think the word ‘nerd’ appears only once, and in passing, as on that page the kid lists several types of animals he would get without much description. So I doubt that’s where the word comes from.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says that Seuss merely popularized it:
Hmmm…I wonder if “nert” has anything to do with “nerts”.
Yeah, where did Yiddish get that word? Since schmuck means “jewelry” in German, and Yiddish is a derivation of German, maybe the phrase equates to “family jewels”.
Cassell’s Slang Dictionary says “etymology unknown” but suggests influence from Mortimer Snerd , one of radio ventriloquist (!) Edgar Bergen’s creations. Mortimer Snerd was very much a nerd in the 1950s sense.
Good Og almighty, that describes half the people I interact with on a daily basis.
I used to think it was related to Schmuck as well, but in the German sense of ‘adornment’ rather than ‘jewels’. According to the O(nline)E(tymology)D, though, schmuck comes from a Old Polish word for snake or dragon, smok. English smock is vaguely related to German Schmuck, though.
Webner already provided the link to the entry for ‘nerd’.
Absolutely NO evidence that it comes from “nert” whatever that is. I’d like to see a contemporary cite where nert=stupid/crazy person.
Wait-I thought it was “putz” that was Yiddish for penis, not “schmuck.”
I have the book here. On the same page are:
an It-Kutch
a Preep
a Nerkle
and a Proo
and a Seersucker, too.
The Preep looks a lot more like a nerd than the Nerd does. There is no description of the Nerd other than the picture.
On an earlier page are mentioned a Gusset, a Gherkin, a Gasket, and a Gootch.
I would agree that Mortimer Snerd, who was actually a nerd, was a more likely influence than Dr. Seuss’s critter, who does not seem to have any nerdlike features, but instead looks like a grouch.
That’s not really the original concept, though. Originally a nerd was just a dork, and typically quite stupid. It is only more recently that it has taken on the connotation of overstudiousness.
Compare the evolution of the word geek, which according to Merriam Webster originally meant:
Geeks only later acquired some brains: