Nerd and Proud

I wouldn’t say that I ever lay awake at night pondering word derivations, but I’d be lying if I said that I don’ find them a reliable source of interest.

Bank Holiday Monday was my oldest daughter Phillippa’s birthday. When we asked her what she wanted to do  she suggested we take her son, who by a strange coincidence is also my grandson, to Barry Island for the day. The weather stayed doggedly cold, and the rides in the funfair stayed doggedly expensive, so we capitulated at about 2pm and came back home to play games on the dining room table.

I was telling my boss about this on Tuesday morning and I reflected that Barry Island was the first place in Wales that I ever visited, some forty nine years ago in 1976. British Rail was in the habit of running special excursion trains to various destinations from Ealing Broadway. And when we saw that there was one going to Barry Island, my older brother and I pestered my parents to take us. Fair play to them, we never had a holiday where we ever got to stay overnight anywhere, but if you pestered them long enough they could occasionally be persuaded to stump up for a day trip like this.

So, you might ask yourself, what was the attraction in 1976? The golden sands? The funfair? The fact that in a few short decades Barry would gain fame as one of the homes of the Gavin and Stacey sitcom? No, It was the Woodhams Brothers scrapyard.

Back in the 60s, after deciding to scrap its fleet of steam locomotives, British Rail sold them to scrapyards the length and breadth of the country, Woodhams being one of them. Woodhams also bought hundreds of coal wagons and made the fateful decision to cut up the wagons first and leave the locomotives alone until all of the wagons were gone. By the mid 70s, most of the locomotives elsewhere ni other scapyards were gone. But Barry Island had become a bit of a mecca for steam enthusiasts.  On that bright day in the baking hot summer of 76 I wouldn’t say that there were massive crowds making their way to Woodhams’, but there were enough. Frankly, I loved it. The experience almost made up for Mum and Dad’s decision to force us to go to the beach first, and then to drag us round in a pointless search for Barry’s cheapest cup of tea. (I'm teatotal  - I don't touch tea.) As a footnote, a huge number of the steam engines owned now by preserved and heritage railway lines were bought from Barry Island.

Now, when my boss expressed surprise about all of this, I explained it all away with the observation that she had to understand that I am, always have been and probably always will be a colossal nerd.

Being a nerd is not a fair weather thing. So I began to wonder where and how such a wonderful word originated. And of course, nobody knows for sure. Some think it may be derived from nerts – an alternative for nuts. Some think it may be derived from knurd. In American colleges this may have denoted someone of a studious and puritanical nature, since it is drunk spelled backwards. Nobody can be certain.

However, we can be certain that the first time the noun nerd ever appeared in print was in a 1950 work by world famous US author Theodore Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss. In his book, “If I ran the Zoo” he wrote

“And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-troo
And bring back an It-kutch, a Preep and a Proo,
A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!”

I can’t help thinking it might have been fun if nerkle had caught on, rather than nerd, but you can’t have everything. My own first memories of hearing the term nerd are from the 1970s US Sitcom “Happy Days”, where it was clearly a term of derision, and being a nerd was not seen as a cool thing to be.

Well, we’ve all passed a lot of water since then. I have recognised and tried to embrace my nerdiness. The case for the prosecution, your honour? Well, and I no particular order –

My boyhood love of steam trains. Come to think of it I still like them a lot.

Given the choice of a range of activities I would always plump for a visit to a Museum or Gallery if that was one of the options

Despite having a degree in English Literature and despite having taught the subject for almost four decades I would rather read non-fiction than fiction.

I get up and go round to my daughter and son in law early on a Saturday morning so I can watch the latest episode of Doctor Who the moment that it drops onto the iplayer at 8am.

Whenever I play in a quiz I cannot stop myself from responding to some questions by explaining how a better question about the subject would be such and such, or giving a juicy factoid about it. (to be fair I do sometimes apologise for doing it now.)

I could go on, but I’m sure you see where I’m coming from. I am what I am and I console myself with Bill Gates’ well publicised words to a group of American high school students,

“Be nice to nerds. Most of you will end up working for one.” Granted, I don’t have anyone working for me, but it’s the thought that counts.

I wonder whether Theodore Seuss Geisel – yes, Seuss was his middle name – was ever considered a nerd himself. He was educated at Dartmouth College in the USA and after graduating, Lincoln College in Oxford University. He was almost kicked out of Dartmouth for drinking gin during prohibition – so maybe more drunk than knurd. He didn’t take a degree at Oxford, but returned to the US, to make a career as a writer and cartoonist. He seems to have been more successful as the latter at first.

Possibly his most famous book, “The Cat in the Hat”, was written to fulfil a challenge he was given by William Spaulding, education director of Houghton Mifflin, to write a book using only the 250 words on the list of words it was thought important for 6 year olds to know. He would go even further with Green Eggs and Ham 2 years later which has a vocabulary of only fifty words – and won a fifty dollar bet for him.