They’re Such Nerds
PRESSING COMICS-RELATED NEWSBREAK: Art Spiegelman is speaking at Hampshire College tonight. Thanks to my job in Alumni Relations, I get to help with his soundcheck! Spiegelman’s roadie had some very specific instructions for this. Among other things, we had to buy him a laser pointer, and were asked to supply an ash tray so that he might smoke throughout the lecture. (This was not allowed, so instead we are to lead him out for a smoke break immediately after.)
Art Spiegelman is the all-powerful father of non-superhero comics, paving the way for the likes of Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, and so many more. To try to capture him in blog-form seems an insult, so I will desist. But if you’re in the Pioneer Valley, you’d better be there.
And now, just to clarify, here are the three definitions that most of the internet seems to have settled on:
Nerd: Nerds are quite intelligent, but socially inept, and clueless where fashion is concerned. Example: the guy in your calculus class who gets everything right…but wears his sweatpants tucked into his socks.
Geek: Geeks are people with specific, “uncool” hobbies and interests (like comic books or computers), but they manage to spin this into a positive thing, by making a job or a lifestyle of it. Example: Google employees, Mac whores.
Dork: Dorks don’t really seem to have much to do with the other two. Rather, dorks are unintelligent, boring, and—apparently—smell bad. They tend to live with their mothers well into their thirties.
Example: Sorry, I don’t know any dorks.
October 24th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
gah! I’M MISSING ART SPIEGELMAN?! But Maus was the start of my morbid comics collection!
October 24th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
will it be recorded?
October 25th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Disagree with your definitions. “geek” generally implies the social deficits, not “nerd”, at least that’s my understanding. Wikipedia backed me up on this last time I checked.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:10 am
oh, yeah, I also didn’t think Maus was that great, so I skipped the speech.
October 25th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Lizz: they had a sound recording for the over-spill rooms (it got really crowded!), but no video.
Dylan: Wiki backs me up on the general idea that “geek” is more about geeky hobbies, whereas “nerd” means intelligent, but…nerdy.
As for your second comment, Dylan: you’re a poo.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I certainly agree on that last point.
October 31st, 2008 at 8:03 am
whoa! so spiegelman talked at Reed right before he went to your school…it’s almost like we were together !!
except, at Reed, we let him smoke.
October 31st, 2008 at 8:04 am
by the way, this comic made me laugh a lot, especially their tiny little hipster legs.
November 8th, 2008 at 6:12 am
THANK YOU for noticing the tiny hipster legs. I can never draw skinny girls to look sufficiently ridiculous in their skinniness. There seems to be no such thing as absurdly/laughably skinny.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
This continues to be one of your GREATEST COMICS (actually tied with several others but still) and I just linked a friend to it as an explanation for why I will not honestly believe that she is “a bit of a gamer” until she proves it. Though not necessarily the same, I think people are tossing that word around too when it is clearly becoming something mainstream and… well, not a binary matter.
January 14th, 2009 at 4:40 am
D’aw, thanks for linking me, Chris. And, um, glad I could help a gamer out? Even though I am not one at all (and would never pretend otherwise)…