Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 1654431" data-attributes="member: 5143">This is a hard one.  It seems to mean different things to different people, and its meaning seems to have expanded more and more.In its original meaning, it seems to tie a bunch of things together and just refer to people who do any of them together as "geeks".  These things are:Computer Science, Computer Repair, Computer GamesScience Fiction, Fantasy (books, movies, other things)Games (Board Games, Role Playing Games, Collectable Card Games)Since, in general, there were a lot of crossover, people who liked at one of those things LIKELY were into the rest of them(or at least SOME of the rest of them).  Since, a large portion of the people into these things were also anti-social, they got picked on for being shy, quiet, and interested in (as the majority of people would say) "stupid, immature things".These are the people who liked programming computers back when you could sit around in your basement for a week programming a computer to do some math, and they thought it was SOO cool.Now, as computers became more useful and more mainstream, "geeks" started gaining positions of power.  They were needed to make the computers work.  So, now, it depends on who you ask what a geek is.Some people believe that "geek" means anyone who puts too much effort into one thing.  For instance, "band geeks", "baseball geeks", "car geeks", "art geeks".  Pretty much, the word seems to mean NOW anyone who puts enough interest in one thing that people view them as weird or they don't get along with people as well.As for nerd.  It seems that as geeks came to be more and more either mainstream or a larger community, a lot of the geeky activities that used to be common amongst 90% of the geeks, now started splitting.  People who were good at computers didn't necessarily like role playing games.  People who liked role playing games might not like science fiction.  From what I've been able to discover, it sounds like the less intense geeks found a name for the more intense geeks, "nerds".  Their way of thinking was "I may know how to fix a computer, but THAT guy knows all the DOS commands, 5 programming languages and has spent the last 6 months attempting to build his own robot, what a NERD!".Of course, as I discovered recent discovered that apparently, depending on who you are talking to, nerd and geek are reversed.  I suggested to a role playing friend of mine that he was a geek and he got all angry.  He said that he was NO geek, he might be a nerd for playing nerdy games, but he wasn't a loser like geeks were.I guess, this being English, we'll never know if there is a RIGHT answer.  All I know is that I like computers, work in the IT industry, like science fiction, fantasy, role playing games, board games, card games, comptuer games, and I consider myself a geek.  All of my friends are too.  I think there is nothing wrong with that.Majoru Oakheart</blockquote>

Verification