I know how exciting these word origin threads are, but I just need to ask this.
After reading the Happy Days question in another thread, I decided to do a search and find the answer to the question. In my delay, others beat me to the answer, but my searching around found an interesting factoid, whose veracity I was unsure of.
Now, since I wasn’t around back then, I have no idea. A cursory web search gave me too much information to sort through, I was hoping someone had already read up on it. (Jeeze, I didn’t realize there was about 100 versions of something called a “Nerdity Test”)
Anyone read any secondary information to back this claim up? Or refute it?
pat
I was given the impression that it was in use from the mid-to-late 50’s, although much of my impressions are from things like tv, which are shown after-the-fact. Its possible that it was largely popularized by Happy Days. Others have confirmed its usage in the 50’s and 60’s.
FWIW I’ll share my theory on the origins of “nerd”:
The 1960 Disney movie The Absent Minded Professer starred Fred McMurray as “Professer Brainerd” (discoverer of “flubber”) who was obsessed with scientific formulas to the exclusion of his social life. Now a more obvious term for an overachieving student was “brain”, so perhaps for a time after the movie came out kids were being called “Brainerd”. This would have later been shortened to “nerd”, and maybe some of the kids thought the term was “brain nerd”, an adjective modifying a noun.
Perhaps the true origin is with Dr. Suess, but there doesn’t seem to be a connection with the qualities of “nerdiness” and it’s spelled differently, so it may be a coincidence.
I’m wit Markxxx. I don’t believe the word was commonly used before Happy Days popularized (invented?) it. Happy Days was the first place I ever heard it.
I don’t know how popular nerd was prior to Happy Days, but it was in use. The OED gives this as it’s first cite (after Dr. Seuss):
It appears that the newpaper was defining slang terms, and nerd was one of them. Maybe nerd was first popularized in Scotland or the U.K. before making it’s way over the pond.
By 1976, when I started there, the accepted spelling had changed to “nerd”, with the former “gnurd” spelling still sometimes used but thought archaic. It is not intuitively obvious why there was a change, except for possible ease of pronunciation, but the time frame is bracketed.
Actually, “tool” was a far more common term, with “nerd” being reserved for extreme cases of toolness.
There is also no apparent connection with the Dr. Seuss fantasy animal, which is just one of many in the book, and has no apparent nerdiness to it, just birdiness. If that constitutes the first citation, I’m sure it wasn’t the seminal one.
I should add that, in 1976, “nurd” was also a common spelling, but was becoming obsolescent even then. That’s clearly a transition from “gnurd” to “nerd”. The adjectival form was “nerdly.”
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