what i’d really want is a version of notes that’s a lot less like social media, or even a comments section, and a lot more like the letters page of the lrb. something that allows writers to have a back-and-forth dialogue, but always anchored to an actual specific piece of text. anyway:

has written a response (linked) to my essay on nerd culture (linked within). here’s my reply.

scott calls his piece ‘contra kriss,’ but i don’t think it’s really a demolition of my thesis - nor does it pretend to be! more a kind of (interesting, conceptually fecund) commentary, pointing out some complications, trying out some alternate reads on things. his first objection is over nomenclature: the people i describe as nerds are, in fact, better described as geeks. and he’s right; there is, within a particular language community, a hazy but real distinction between the categories of nerd, geek, and dork. a cluster of terms that refer, variously, to people who were slightly too good at school, people who are obsessively into various low-prestige culture-commodities, and people who are simply socially maladroit and unpopular. martin is a nerd; bart is a geek; milhouse is a dork. of course, these three have a high degree of comorbidity; the kids who do quadratic equations for fun are likely to also watch doctor who all day and be (mysteriously) despised by their peers. when i was at school we in the uk had another word, neek, a portmanteau of nerd and geek that was usually just flung at dorks. (being a neek was very, very bad. nobody ever self-identified as a neek.)

in my essay, i use the word nerd in a different way. this was probably the single most common complaint i received: a lot of self-identified nerds pointed out that actually, they weren’t at all interested in the marvel movies or twitch streams, but they were good at programming or reciting ugarit poetry. my defence is that i’m using the word in its general sense outside that particular language community: in the sense used by the people who happily describe themselves as ‘such a nerd’ because they own all the harry potter funko pops, even though they don’t know their ugarit from their arsehole. i think my critics tend to think of these people as ‘fake nerds,’ but there are a lot more of them than the real ones. ‘nerd culture’ is a widely-used term. here, i think i’m just following actual usage. the fake nerds won.

but as scott points out, my definition of nerd stuff would include a few things that are not usually thought of as nerdy, such as sports:

Sports is certainly bad: it’s a bunch of sweaty adult men freaking out about who has a ball for two hours, for several hundred almost-identical episodes per season. And man, do people obsess over it.

so: like scott, i could never really get into sports. (this might be why i know the precise emotional valence of the word neek.) it’s not for me. and i do actually make the connection in a footnote, where i point out that nerds have the same relation to their culture-commodities as sports fans do to their team. there’s definitely something there. but to be honest, i’m not sure that sports are bad: professional sports are, after all, a group of impeccably trained athletes performing at the very limits of human potential. it doesn’t really excite me, but it might even plausibly be good. and the people who support sports teams that are not good usually do so for explicable reasons. even the most devoted scunthorpe united fan will admit that their team is not as good at football as arsenal or liverpool; they like it because they’re from scunthorpe, or their parents were, or for some other reason that has something to do with the emotive and sensuous properties of the game. they are not nerds.

(there is, of course, such a thing as a sports nerd. nate silver is a sports nerd; the guy screaming kick it! at a pub tv until he’s cherry-red is not.)