Some musings on the nature of geek

The musings in this entry have grown out of some recent idle conversations with both my PhD supervisor and my wife, both of whom are geeks.

It's not uncommon to see people on the web (if you hang around in the right places, anyway) taking pains to use the words "geek" and "nerd" in such a way so as to properly respect what is apparently supposed to be the canonical difference in meaning of the terms: that the term "nerd" is supposed to carry a connotation of social ineptitude in addition to unusual levels technical or intellectual skills and knowledge. Supposedly geek is supposed to refer strictly to the skills and knowledge without making comment on social skills. Personally I had never heard mention of this distinction until I came across people loudly chastising those who disregarded it in casual online conversation. You'd be surprised how much some people care about it.

Perhaps this isn't particularly surprisingly, really, since pedantry is an integral part of being both a nerd or a geek, under these definitions. But it does surprise me that, to date, I haven't seen anybody make an effort to tackle what I see as a much bigger problem of semantics in the same domain: the fact the the word "geek" can be extremely ambiguous. It has two common meanings.

One the on hand, there is "geek" in what I'll call a cultural sense - geek culture. This is being deeply interested in and knowledgeable about Star Wars or Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. It's playing Dungeons and Dragons or Magic: The Gathering or Warhammer. It's reading copious quantities of science fiction or fantasy. It's reading and/or collecting comic books. It's using and recognising lines from classic video games like "you are likely to be eaten by a grue". I probably don't need to go on: this culture is sufficiently intuitively recognisable by outsiders and sufficiently self-aware amongst insiders that regardless of which of those two you are you probably know exactly what I'm talking about by now.

On the other hand, there is "geek" in the "skills and knowledge" sense mentioned earlier. In this sense, geeks are people who are obsessed with knowledge and understanding. They are driven by instinct to seek out new knowledge about their interests, and they can't stomach not understanding things. They idealise logic, rationality and internal consistency, and are prone to think and talk in a manner which seems needlessly formal, precise and pedantic to non-geeks, though this way of thinking and speaking comes completely naturally to them. They are likely to use scientific or mathematical terminology, techniques or metaphors in discussing things usually considered to be outside their realm of applicability, like personal or social matters. To paraphrase Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon, they are people who "put a lower priority on social graces than on having every statement uttered in a conversation be literally true". This sense of the word "geek" is the origin of common compound terms like "computer geek" or "physics geek", and has a lot in common with the original meaning and spirit of the word "hacker" - "A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular".

There's no doubt that these two forms of geekiness are strongly correlated. Most people who are one kind of geek to any significant extent are probably, at the very least, more of the other kind of geek than is typical. I suspect (verifying my status as a geek in the second sense!) that in a principal components analysis of a large body of personality data these two dimensions would likely be compressed into one. However, it is entirely possible for someone to be a serious cultural geek while not having the geek mindset, and vice versa. I've met people of both extremes. This introduces a pretty strong ambiguity into the word "geek". There are bound to be situations where one wants to describe someone as one kind of geek without implying that they are the other, where the desired meaning is not made clear by context alone. I'm not aware of any convenient, single-word way in which to solve this problem. This feels to me like a much more useful distinction to be able to make than whether or not a person has social skills.

Given the nature of geeks in the second sense, I'm astonished this hasn't already been cleared up with new terminology. "Type II geeks" loathe ambiguity!