Nerd vs. Nebbish

Who's the bigger loser?

By Franklin Foer

(posted Saturday, July 11, 1998)

You can talk about globalization,

the sexual revolution, or the civil

rights movement. But one of the

greatest upheavals of the century is

the liberation of the nerd. Many have

noted the rise of the Silicon Valley

programmer and the iconification of

Bill Gates. Few have placed these

developments in context. Nerds, once

defined as squares and losers, now

also lord over Washington (Newt

Gingrich, Al Gore) and Hollywood

(Steven Spielberg, Quentin

Tarantino).

Just as the women's rights movement

revolutionized male-female relations, so also

has this movement created its own turmoil.

With the advent of the power nerd, we can no

longer say for certain what makes a nerd a

nerd. Or, to put it another way, what now

separates the nerds from the nebbishes? The

time has come to reassess and redefine the

loser.

obody--not William Safire, not the Oxford

English Dictionary--has concretely

pinned down the origin of the word nerd. One

theory traces it to a throwaway passage in Dr.

Seuss' lesser-known 1950 children's book If I

Ran the Zoo. Another considers it a variation

of the 1940s put-down nerts to you, as in

"nuts to you." A third derives it from turd.

Whatever its origins, the appellation rose

to prominence in the 1950s, the High Age of

Conformity, when boomers employed it to

condemn the most conformist of the

conformists, the squarest of the squares. And

the phrase conjured up a specific image: the

greasy, pocket-protected teen in thick,

horn-rimmed glasses.

learly, the unstylish, klutzy bookworm has

existed throughout history. (Einstein is an

obvious example of a nerd who predated the

term.) But nerdiness became well defined

only after the birth of its

opposite--coolness--during the prosperous

postwar era, as the middle class expanded to

include vast new segments of the population.

These new constituencies adopted bourgeois

values, among them a fixation with

fashion--what's cool and what's not. Nerdy

was not.

But the popular understanding of

nerdiness--that a nerd is an uncool

person--doesn't stand the test of time. In

particular, it doesn't survive the 1980s, an era

the New York Times deemed was

characterized by "nerd chic." By the middle of

the go-go decade, fashion magazines touted

the popularity of nerd couture--plaid plants,

horn rims, and oxford shirts buttoned all the

way to the top. Further, witness the

proliferation of '80s teen movies valorizing

nerds: Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science,

and Real Genius, to name a few. Underlying

this transformation of the nerd's image was a

transformation of the nerd's economic status.

With their entry into new high-tech industries,

many nerds suddenly became millionerds.

et me posit a more durable definition than

the nerd-cool opposition: Nerdiness is

connoisseurship gone awry. The essential

characteristic of nerds is that they lack a

normal understanding of style and social

graces. The essential reason they get this way

is that as youths they channel their mental

energies into a particular area--film,

computers, politics--at the expense of learning

social conventions. Nerds may or may not

carry their adolescent obsession into

adulthood, but the scars of their obsession

remain palpable. (Note: Rare is the person

who becomes a nerd later in life. Bill Clinton,

for instance, may have developed an unusual

passion for policy in his 20s, but it never

interfered with his social being.)

The popular parlance conflates nerd with

nebbish. But the overlap between the two

concepts is not large, more on the order of

this:

hile one could build a Nerd Hall of

Fame, nebbishes are almost always

anonymous. By definition, nebbishes are

whiners, lacking self-confidence, generally

inept, and on the losing end of social

transactions--all characteristics that work

against their ever achieving fame. The only

famous nebbishes are fictional characters:

George Costanza, Isaac Bashevis Singer's

Gimple the Fool, George McFly in Back to

the Future, and virtually anyone played by

Woody Allen or Rick Moranis.

Other attributes: 1) Nebbishes are

necessarily schlumpy, never handsome or

physically robust. 2) The term is usually

applied to men--often implying effeminacy.

But it would not be inaccurate to describe a

woman as a nebbish or as nebbishy. 3) Few

nebbishes are actually nerds or

intellectuals--some Woody Allen characters

excepted. They lack the nerd's enterprise and

obsessivesness. By contrast, many nerds can

be handsome (Gore) or self-confident to the

point of arrogance (Gates, Gingrich).

At the heart of the nerd-nebbish divide is

pity. Nebbishes are too pathetic to warrant

actual disdain. They are too easy a target. On

the other hand, nerds evoke envy. We hate

them because they are smarter, or more

studious, or more focused than we are. Nerds

are genuinely threatening.

t is no accident that the word nebbish

originated in Yiddish, a language without a

nation that is spoken by a people repeatedly

beaten down by pogroms and thus in a good

position to empathize with nebbishes. So, to

pose the obvious question: Is there something

inherently Jewish about the nebbish?

According to the great Yiddish linguist Max

Weinreich, Jews appropriated the word

nebbich from their Slavic neighbors in the

11th century. Indeed, other European nations

with similar histories of subjugation maintain

similar words. In Ukrainian, for instance, the

word bidni refers to an unfortunate, pitiable

soul. Italian has poverino. The fact that

nebbish made it into English owes much to

Jewish Borscht Belt comedians becoming '50s

TV stars.

Nebbishes will never ascend to the

heights of nerds. There will be no Revenge of

the Nebbishes, no nebbish liberation. A

nebbish could never gain real power. More

easily, one can imagine nebbishes banding

together to promote a nebbish agenda,

kvetching that they are systematically

discriminated against, demanding Nebbish

Studies at universities, and complaining that

history textbooks treat them as losers. But

only a schmegegge would ever bet on a

nebbish.

Links

If you're unsure of your identity, the National

Order of Nerds and the Nerd Revolutionary

Front provide tests of nerdiness. The Internet

Movie Database breaks out a list of "nerd

movies." Classics include Closet Cases of the

Nerd Kind and Nerds of a Feather. To brush

up on the distinctions between schlimeal,

schlamazel, and schmendrick, check out a

Yiddish dictionary here. The largest set of

Yiddish resources can be found at the Virtual

Shtetl.