I love nerds...so I was talking to my mom and I called her a nerd...I dunno I call alot of people nerds. It's my loving way of saying you are silly and make me happy...I dunno...so I looked it up...what does nerd mean, where did it come from?
"The first documented use of the word Nerd is in the 1950 Dr. Seuss story, If I Ran the Zoo1, in which a boy named Gerald McGrew made a large number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do, if he were in charge at the zoo. Among these was that he would bring a creature known as a Nerd from the land of Ka-Troo. The accompanying illustration showed a grumpy humanoid with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt. A fitting image, these days, for a nerd.
I first learned about the Dr. Seuss connection from the American Heritage Dictionary's word history in their nerd entry. According to that entry some experts 'maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd ("comically unpleasant creature") was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a "square."'
The problem with this is that the second documented occurrence of the word comes only a year after If I Ran The Zoo. The The October 8, 1951 issue of Newsweek states on page 16 that
In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve."
~Sparkles
"The first documented use of the word Nerd is in the 1950 Dr. Seuss story, If I Ran the Zoo1, in which a boy named Gerald McGrew made a large number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do, if he were in charge at the zoo. Among these was that he would bring a creature known as a Nerd from the land of Ka-Troo. The accompanying illustration showed a grumpy humanoid with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt. A fitting image, these days, for a nerd.
I first learned about the Dr. Seuss connection from the American Heritage Dictionary's word history in their nerd entry. According to that entry some experts 'maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd ("comically unpleasant creature") was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a "square."'
The problem with this is that the second documented occurrence of the word comes only a year after If I Ran The Zoo. The The October 8, 1951 issue of Newsweek states on page 16 that
In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve."
~Sparkles