A month ago, I picked up a copy of Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd, and finally got around to reading it the last few days. The prospect of reading an entire book on nerds was exciting—I was a nerd after all—but I have to admit, I was also a little skeptical when I first leafed through the pages. I thought there might be too much auto-biographical mush filling the pages. But I was pleasantly surprised. Within his cool, calm, accessible, and measured prose, there is, to be sure, a dose of autobiographical tales (and this is part of what gives him his “cred”) but these are weaved richly and deftly into a series of ruminations and explanations—anthropological, psychological, literary, and historical in nature—on what makes up a nerd.

What are nerds? Who are nerds? These are the types of basic questions he asks and spends the whole book answering. On the one hand, to be a nerd is as simple and unremarkable (though not so fun) as being designated by others such. Neither ascribed nor achieved status, this form of nerdom is bequeathed by others and accepted reluctantly, if at all.

Yet there is a whole lot more to nerdiness than imputation. First, he explores many types of nerds in relationship to their behaviors and activities (gamers, D & D players, science fiction fans, those that blast to the past through the Society of Creative Anachronism, and even faux-nerds that now populate hipster neighborhoods such as Williamsburg and Wicker Park). Along with giving a window into the lives of these folks, most of whom were probably nerds growing up and still may be sort of nerdy in their behavior, he provides a decent historical genealogy of the word as well as the broader cultural context in the United States that would make a nerd a recognizable figure decades later when it was popularized in print and TV.

To work out how American developed its concept of a nerd,” writes Nugent, “it helps to establish how American arrived at its concept of a sportsman.” He argues that the move from an agricultural to an industrial society helped prompt the rise of sport as a method and cultural marker to “reclaim physical mastery” which was marked somewhat dramatically in the Ivy League institutions that started to valorize sport and masculinity (University of Chicago did not seem to follow the trend and hence it is known as a haven for nerds). Given this overarching context, where masculinity was defined through sport and body, the nerd, culturally speaking, lost out.

The term itself also has a specific history. First appearing in the pages of Dr Seuss as a mythical animal, nerd, it was only later at a fairly nerdy school, RPI, whereby it would take on its current and more familiar usage. RPI published a college humor journal by the name of Bachelor, which started, in the 1960s, to feature a dud by the name of Nurdly and soon after, the term nerd became used for any dud. Thanks to the SNL skits featuring Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, nerd eventually became a house hold name by the late 1970s.

If the term nerd has a recent history, perhaps the importance of Nugent’s book is how it goes elsewhere to help us understand nerdom. One fascinating place he goes is to broader (and often negative) cultural representations of the “Jew” and the racism they faced who were in part discriminated against because of their extreme intellectual dedication, which he argues “suggest Jews sometimes played a role in certain popular imaginations not so different from that of today’s nerd.” He then puts this into play with other discussions of racism such as old fashioned racism against African Americans to make the excellent point that nerds and Africa/African Americans are also in the popularly imaginary, diametrically opposed (and Weird Al makes this same point or reproduces this imaginary here).

The second interesting place he goes to is not to culture or history but to biology and disability. He proposes something that I have heard a number of times, which is that many nerds have some form of autism/aspergers. Now he has a pretty interesting argument as to why, even if this is the case, we should not fall back on this categorization but I am leaving that post for later and for this blog .

Finally, I did have some issues with the book. Overall I appreciated the cool and calm tone of his prose but at times I wanted a little more punch (and a lack of index I find really frustrating). But those are minor annoyances.

What I was actually utterly surprised by was there was no discussion of a closely related terms/figure, which has grown in popularity in recent times: geek. These terms are not synonymous, but they are close cousins. If nothing else and as I mentioned, many nerds are nerds because they are labeled as such and many (most?) would not self-identify in such a way, at least not regularly. Instead many might call themselves geeks, especially after they found their social geek clan, whether it be gamers, hackers, etc. etc. Yet the echo or shadow of nerd is in the term geek in a way that it is not in gamer, hacker, etc.

This term gives a window into the ways in which one term, geek, is used to replace another term, nerd, to transform ones status from undesirable and marginal to cool and powerful. Since Nugent provided a genealogy of the term nerd, it would have also be helpful to have a similar genealogy of geek. When did it arise? Can we locate its source? What other similar terms exist in other forms of cultural categorization (gay and queer?). Providing a similar history of the term geek would have enriched his account significantly because it would have provided what is actually is missing: self-understandings of the term nerds from nerds. He sticks to behaviors, attributions, stereotypes, representations in literature, practices as well as his own experiences but a little more quasi-ethnographic material on self-understandings (and geek may have been an entry into this) would have deepened what is otherwise a really engaging account.