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Venn diagramming for nerds

Ben Zimmer’s recent Word Routes column on Visual Thesaurus, “Word-Lore, Nerd-Lore”, returns to the question of the origin of nerd (a topic Ben looked at a little while ago in a Boston Globe column, “Birth of the Nerd”, quoted on this blog here) and links to this entertaining Venn diagram:

Note that all four of the terms in this diagram — dweeb, nerd, geek, and dork — are of obscure etymology. This is a semantic domain where people are likely to just make words up.

 

This entry was posted on September 17, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Etymology, Language and society, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Venn diagramming for nerds”

  1. vocalised Says:
    September 17, 2011 at 10:02 am | Reply

    Coincidentally, I just saw this link on Twitter: http://blogs.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2011/09/17/frasers-phrases-british-nerd-slang-swots-and-boffins/

  2. geek, dork, etc. | Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:
    September 1, 2013 at 8:54 am | Reply

    […] blog, “Geek days” of 5/22/12. And earlier, “Venn diagramming for nerds” of 9/17/11, where I […]

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