wordy wednesday: nerds {august 23, 2023}

Foodie. Mountain biker. Airplane builder. Witty. Sense of humor. The farm's sound system fixer. Excellent conversationalist.  Hard worker. Many post-graduate options. A young man who's going to do something great. He describes himself as a nerd.

This young man, an electrical engineer, and I met at our summer job at the farm. One day as we were talking about sound and how he may pursue something to do with sound in post graduate studies, he said, "I hope I don't bother you talking about this, but I'm a nerd when it comes to this kind of thinking." And he went on to say, "You know a nerd is someone who has an intense focus on something that catches his/her interest." My reply was, "We all have a little bit of nerdiness in us."

It's Wordy Wednesday and so in my word nerdiness, I began pondering nerd's origination. "Nerd" dates from the 1950s. Dr. Seuss coined it in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, but not in the sense that we use today. The usage of nerd is now often used in a neutral fashion to denote enthusiasm or expertise (theater nerd) or proudly as a self-identifying trait (word nerd) 😁 

I do love words. I love their etymologies, their sounds, spellings, synonyms and antonyms, how a collection of words paints a picture or evokes emotion, plays on words. This could easily lead to a discussion of the power of words but that is a much bigger picture. Right now it's just about a niche interest. Think about what interests you and be proud of your nerdy self.