5 geekies

[firecat]

miz_geek tags me with the following meme:

List 5 reasons why you are a dork/geek. And make them good reasons. Justify them. Explain them. Be loud and proud about how big of a dork you are! Then pick the 5 biggest dorks you know and have them do the meme.

1. I am a word geek. I care about the following: In my culture, dork and geek don't mean the same thing. Geek is a descriptive and positive word that means someone who passionately cares about the details of one or more subjects, activities, or disciplines; someone who has a particular orientation toward acquiring and dispensing knowledge. It might secondarily mean someone who cares more about knowledge than appearance or social skills, but not necessarily. Dork, on the other hand, is a pejorative word meaning someone who is deficient in both social skills and intelligence. Dork is a word that the OH and I use at drivers who act like they don't know what they're doing.

I am not a dork. (I hope.)

I just looked up the definition of dork on Google, and I see that wikipedia says that dork and geek can be used synonymously, but it does seem to also suggest that dork is more often pejorative.

2. I'm poly, which might suggest to some people that I get into new relationships all the time and have lots of hot sex. My love life is pretty OK, but actually, what turns me on the most is getting excited about a new subject or hobby. I fell in love with beading and beads a year and a half ago, and knitting nine months ago. And those led to lots of research and acquiring of large stashes of supplies. But I don't only get excited about new hobbies that I participate in. I get excited about hobbies that other people participate in. So a while back I got excited by the sport of dog agility and I began researching it, joining mailing lists, going to dog agility shows (and being the only person there who wasn't running a dog, judging, or selling stuff).

3. When I get interested in something, I find myself organizing the knowledge I acquire. I make charts and lists and enormous web browser bookmark collections. A while back, I was interested in publications for short science fiction and fantasy fiction. I spent a week obsessively researching and creating a giant list of all the publications I could find, with pay rates (and a separate sublist for publications that only pay in copies), guidelines summaries, response times, and so on. I finally realized that I could just stick it on the web and it would be a resource for others. I posted a link to it, warning everyone that it was "a big ugly text file. deal." Eventually someone else took it over; it's now in html but still retains the "big ugly text file" look that I love. Unfortunately, the non-paying publications have been removed.
http://home.att.net/~p.fleming/Sfmktall.html (scroll down)

4. I can't remember what life was like before google.

5. I've made a living as an instructional designer / technical writer / technical editor for 15 years. I'm good at understanding tech stuff and translating it into English.

Tagging: If I think anyone on my flist is a dork (see item 1), I'm not admitting it. So I'm not tagging anyone. But I'd really like to see what others say in response to this meme. If you respond to it, I'd appreciate if you left a comment here.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

See, to me "geek" has the old-style meaning, from carnival sideshows and Nightmare Alley, of someone who bites the heads off chickens, snakes, etc. in a pit for the amusements of an audience, a/k/a rubes.

It is amusing to me that geek (new meaning), dork, and nerd have a certain convergence of meaning. Many people do assume that intellectual meticulousness (or pedantry), social clumsiness (or rudeness), and physical clumsiness have to go together.

[firecat]

Many people do assume that intellectual meticulousness (or pedantry), social clumsiness (or rudeness), and physical clumsiness have to go together.

And I don't think they HAVE to go together, but I've noticed that they seem to go together somewhat more often than pure chance might suggest. I wonder why.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

From the vicinity of my ass comes the following thought: maybe the three have been associated so long in certain cultures that people who are branded with one aspect tend to live down to the expectation of the others?

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

In Real Life: I see it partly as a function of the fact that there is only so much time (so developing one area very, very much can take away from developing in another), partly because people who are strong in one area but not others seem naturally to outnumber the Renaissance people, and partly because developing a lot of strength in one area can be a response to being weak in others. Then, once there are a number of lopsidedly-developed people in a job or social area, others have less pressure to be well rounded instead of lopsided.

In Stereotypes: I think a lot of these stereotypes are based int he idea that life is fair, so being gifted in one area means being shorted in another. The flip side of the sterotype that blondes are dumb.