Throughout America’s cultural childhood,“nerd” held an incredibly negative connotation. Those who were cast into this category seemed to live exclusively in their Dungeons & Dragons guilds, while those doing the casting effectively created a classification with a word with unexpected historical origins.
Author and Iowa Writers’ Workshop student Ben Nugent decided to uncover the tradition behind the word that defined so many. He studied it, created a logical idea of where it came from, and researched groups of people that fell into the the definition of “nerd.”
Nugent will read from his book, American Nerd: The Story of My People, today at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. Admission is free.
The word “nerd” first appeared in 1950 in the book If I Ran the Zoo, by Dr. Seuss. Nugent said there is a character in the story whom the author described as a tiny, angry old man called a Nerd. Nugent said that after kids read the book, they started applying the title to ordinary life.
But despite the relatively new term, the actual idea of a nerd dates back many more years.
Characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (namely Mary Bennet), are all classic examples of nerds, Nugent said. They are people who have a hard time interacting with others and thrive from following systems and rules.
“This can apply to people who like computers — computer programming is an elaborate system of rules — but it can also apply to people who are very systematic and rule-loving in the way they talk about something like records they collect,” Nugent said. “That love of categorizing things and ranking things and talking about things rather than going out and playing basketball or talking about music.”
One of the ways he assembled research and ideas for American Nerd was by drawing from his own childhood experiences. He described himself in his early years as being socially awkward, though he said he was able to find a group of kids similar to himself who enjoyed staying inside and playing games similar to Dungeons & Dragons.
“We also used to do this fake medieval times fighting where we would like make these swords out of PVC piping, and put duct tape around them, and whack the shit out of each other on a field somewhere, and call each other medieval names,” he said.
Nugent’s own life wasn’t the only place he researched. Besides gaining ideas from his friends, he also traveled the country — interviewing different groups of people who engage in various activities that can be classified as “nerdy,” including groups of medieval fighters.
The author said he found it was moving to meet the many different types of organized groups.
Nugent saw positive outcomes for those who were in “nerdy” groups, such as high-school debate teams, because the skills they were learning — talking with intellectual counterparts — was more productive than a group of nerds staging a battle.
“With something like medieval battles, it gets a little more ambiguous,” he said. “You’re like, ‘Wow, you’re having a really good time, and there’s a certain “you go” aspect to doing your own thing, but man, you’re sequestered from the reality the rest of us are in a really profound way.’ So that finding of one’s place in the world can be a dangerous thing as well as good thing. I think seeing that tragedy and that comic/tragic aspect of it is really interesting.”
One of the concerns he has about the nerds of today is that they will become much too dependent on sitting alone in front of a computer interacting with the digital world instead of finding groups of similar people and getting together in one room to partake in a common activity.
“I think it was really important, at least when I was a kid playing [Dungeons & Dragons] that we got together in the same room and actually had to have contact with each other face-to-face,” he said. “Especially for really dorky kids, it’s so easy to spend your entire life on a computer. The fact that nerds communicate solely through the Internet now is a potentially bad thing as well as a useful thing.”