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The essence of a Geek

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Geeks

Matthew Broersma ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 17 Jan 2006 12:30 GMT

...the medieval dialect words geck, from Low German, and gek, from Middle Low German, meaning "fool"; Shakespeare used the word "geck" in this sense in several plays. (For instance, from Cymbeline: "Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy, to taint his nobler heart and brain with needless jealousy; and to become the geck and scorn o' the other's villany?")

The modern word surfaced in American slang in the early 20th Century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and continued to refer to various kinds of oddballs. The OED records this example from the 1916 Wells Fargo Messenger: "A new Wells agent struck our town the other week, and say you never saw a more enthusiastic geek!" By the 1950s Webster's dictionary recorded that the word referred to a carnival sideshow weirdo "whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake".

At some point, the word began to be used to refer to people with an interest so obsessive that it puts them outside the mainstream — as it still is used to talk about people with an inordinate knowledge of, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, its most immediate association is now with technology, and particularly with people who actually make technology work.

Too much Buffy
Somewhere along the line, geek also seems to have lost most of its negative connotations — unlike nerd and anorak, which still tend to be used as insults. The word's reclamation was probably a more or less deliberate effort on the part of geeky technology types who began using it to refer to themselves, say some. "It's a taking-back-the-language thing," says Jez Higgins, a freelance developer.

To some degree "geek" overlaps with "hacker", a word used as a badge of honour to mean a particularly adept programmer, though "hacker" has some extra moral implications that "geek" lacks. Most would agree that Bill Gates is a geek, but few would class him as a hacker, due to the perecieved quality of his company's technology and his taste for world domination. "He doesn't have the hacker's ethos," Higgins says.

Soul of a New Machine
The traditional idea of the geek (as opposed to the New Geek) seems to originate from the world of the sciences and the oddballs they tend to attract — people like Albert Einstein, who had a wardrobe full of identical clothing and saw nothing wrong with smoking cigarette butts collected off the street. Once computers started to become an important force in society, non-fiction accounts such as Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, Steven Levy's Hackers and Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires familiarised the public at large with the people behind the scenes — the nerdy, obsessive, and strangely heroic computer types who created modern computing in the 1970s and 1980s and commercialised the Internet in the 1990s.

More recently, figures from the world of open source or free software have come more into the public eye. Specifically, you have programmers such as Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement; and Eric Raymond, author of the influential open source manifesto The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Some of these figures fulfil the public's image of the geek as a bit peculiar — reclusive, having difficulties with social behaviour and the rest of it.

Stallman, for example, had a very solitary childhood and has retained a reputation as an extremely uncompromising personality, as described by Sam Williams in a 2003 biography, Free as in Freedom. "His rhetoric is very seductive, but he's also got a very repellent side of his personality. He's a control freak, he's very meticulous," Williams remarked in an interview at the time of the book's publication. Raymond is known for his efforts to build bridges between Stallman's world of free software and the compromised world of business through the open source movement. He is also a libertarian who, when...

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