Geek: /gēk/ (Noun) 1. A carnival performer often billed as a wild man.  2. A person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked.  3. An enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary

July 13th is Embrace Your Geek Day.  There has been a lot of confusion about what it means to be a geek.  Is it the same as being a nerd or a dork?  How about a dweeb?  Do we all really know what those terms mean, or have we largely lived off of stereotypes we’ve seen in movies?

Or have the meanings changed over time?

The dictionary definitions for geek, nerd and dork all tend to lean toward using words like inept, lacking social skills, or unattractive to describe them – all holdovers of stereotypes from around thirty years ago when movies began indoctrinating us about what it means to be socially awkward.

Revenge of the Nerds made its movie debut in 1984, introducing us to a class of people who were incredibly smart, but socially incapable of holding it together. Nerds were portrayed as clumsy, gangly, poorly dressed and incredibly shy around members of the opposite sex.   Everyone else, of course, was knee-deep in partying, posing with our self-important cliques, ditching class and getting sexually involved with someone they shouldn’t.   Yeah…

Every kid who tinkered with his Commodore 64 at the time, who stayed home at night to learn COBOL or Fortran was immediately put into this category, and socially treated like a Casey Anthony trial juror.  If in addition to your technological prowess your idea of haute couture was to mix patterns between your pants and shirt (and maybe even your socks oh my!,) oh it just went downhill from there.  Life was a banquet all around you, and you were the gristle on the side of some jock’s plate.

I’m not bitter.

At some point, the kids who threw balls at the heads of the socially inept began to see some pretty cool games being marketed for those Commodores, put down their round rubber weapons, and tentatively picked up joysticks.  To play.  With each other, that is, not with the nerds, who went on to buy the first Macintosh computers and discovered computerized role-playing games.  The thick bully-filled line that once separated the nerd and the non-nerd, however, had begun to thin up a bit.

As more socially-inclined kids began talking amongst each other about the video games they liked, word got out that it was okay to spend hours at home destroying asteroids or jousting on the back of an ostrich.  Video arcades boomed with the always promising element of meeting girls and competing for best score, drawing more boys out of their rooms to stand before loud, clanging, beeping, musical screens for hours and hours.  This time, right next to the nerds, marveling at their ability to go through level after level of Donkey Kong.  The geek was born, as it suddenly became cool to be absolutely into technology.

Nowadays, the term geek belongs to anyone who has an incredible interest in just about anything.  We can still “geek out” on any PS3 game, but chances are we might also geek out to a football team or HBO’s True Blood series.  These days, the amount of time a kid spends interested in technology would’ve accounted for at least a dozen middle school wedgies a day in the 80′s.  Their use of technology today far outweighs that of almost any long-ago nerd.

The term nerd has all but disappeared from our lexicon – when’s the last time your heard it being used?  Many of us aspire to have enough time to geek out on any number of interests, can effectively balance a somewhat healthy social life along with our interests, and can figure out how to match a shirt with a proper pair of dress slacks.   So if nerds don’t exist, and the rest of us can move in and out of society’s greater ranks without a child pointing and guffawing at us, what happened to the nerds?  What happened to our badly dressed introverts, whose brains appear to have made a connection with the Matrix prior to gestation?  This is where the term dorks come in.

Yesterday’s nerds are today’s dorks.  We had to make up a whole new definition, if only to be able to have some semblance of self-respect after all of the technology loving we borrowed from the nerds.  C’mon, we download and install open source code from places like WordPress, install browser extensions as we enjoy the beta test of Google+, and many of us have taken a swing or two at coding with HTML.  We are more socially graceful nerds, and we know how to dress.

Dorks are everything a nerd used to be seen as, without the technophilia; awkward and funny to watch, but without the useful game skills that might still melt a gamer girl’s heart.  They’ll never amount to much, right?  Or, are we about to see, once again, the emergence of a new social-techno savvy generation, that embraces the term dork and makes it all their own?

Maybe this time next year, I’ll be sharing the joy of embracing your inner dork…

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