June 18, 2013 by Miss Merc
At first, “geek” was a derogatory word, flung at intellectuals and recluses and Star Wars fans alike by the “cool kids;” the jocks, the Wall Street sharks, the Valley Girls. Geeks were portrayed as pocket-protector-sporting, suspender-needing weirdos incapable of speaking to people without stammering or mouthbreathing.
Actually, no.
Geek still IS a derogatory word, harking back to the freak shows of the traveling carnivals. The geek in question would generally be so unskilled and otherwise useless that the only thing he/she could do to attract an audience would be to bite the heads off of live animals, primarily chickens or rats. Much like the black folk have tried to reclaim 'nigger' as some ironic badge of honor, there has been some similar clumsy attempt to rebrand 'geek'. Judging from Mercante's attempt, along with multiple others, these have all failed.
'Nerd', conversely, was once a derogatory term used as she claims above - but has since come to denote the higher-IQ type melvin that proves useful; essentially the polar opposite of the useless geek. Ten seconds of research would have revealed that (Sauce:
Encyclopedia Brittanica) to anyone, but knowing what you're talking about is only for people that DON'T like looking like fucking idiots. A very exclusive club that Mercante never applied to, it seems.
However, despite outing the rest of her family, she never claims to be a geek herself in her little manifesto. As close as she gets is claiming a reaction to David Tennant that I would advise him to seek a protection order based on, and a claim that there 'is a geek within all of us'. It's the sort of non-committal populist rhetoric that one is generally trained to belch out to ingratiate oneself to whatever group you plan to infiltrate, vis a vis, "I'm just like you" without actually incriminating yourself. This way you can claim you "were just playing a role" when questioned by the administration, internal affairs, or the other "cool kids" later on. It's not clever. She's not clever.
But at least she's a geek. She can be proud of that. No one else will be, though.