Geeky words are more about stuff while nerdy words are more about ideas

From On “Geek” Versus “Nerd” by Burr Settles.

Though suggestive rather than rigorous, fun to speculate none the less. Settles is interested in the distinction between geek and nerd.

Both are dedicated to their subjects, and sometimes socially awkward. The distinction is that geeks are fans of their subjects, and nerds are practitioners of them. A computer geek might read Wired and tap the Silicon Valley rumor-mill for leads on the next hot-new-thing, while a computer nerd might read CLRS and keep an eye out for clever new ways of applying Dijkstra’s algorithm. Note that, while not synonyms, they are not necessarily distinct either: many geeks are also nerds (and vice versa).

An Experiment

Do I have any evidence for this contrast? (By the way, this viewpoint dates back to a grad-school conversation with fellow geek/nerd Bryan Barnes, now a physicist at NIST.) The Wiktionary entries for “geek” and “nerd“ lend some credence to my position, but I’d like something a bit more empirical…

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps” ~ J.R. Firth (1957)

To characterize the similarities and differences between “geek” and “nerd,” maybe we can find the other words that tend to keep them company, and see if these linguistic companions support my point of view?

Conclusion

In broad strokes, it seems to me that geeky words are more about stuff (e.g., “#stuff”), while nerdy words are more about ideas (e.g., “hypothesis”). Geeks are fans, and fans collect stuff; nerds are practitioners, and practitioners play with ideas. Of course, geeks can collect ideas and nerds play with stuff, too. Plus, they aren’t two distinct personalities as much as different aspects of personality. Generally, the data seem to affirm my thinking.

I wonder how similar the results would be if you applied this method to the Google Books Ngrams corpus, or something more general instead of a niche media like Twitter. I also wonder what other questions might be answered with this kind of analysis (for example, my wife and I have a perennial disagreement over which word is wetter: “moist” vs. “damp.”).

Here are the pictorial results of Settles' analysis. Click to enlarge.

From my perspective, the interesting thing is the close balance of all things reading between geeks and nerds, i.e. almost all book-related terms are very close to the 45% line dividing geeks from nerds. Most terms fall just on the nerd side of the line except for ibooks and ebooks which fall on the geek side (consistent with Settles' observation about stuff versus ideas). Also of note is that #books, #reading, #bookworm, and #library are all strongly related (with both geeks and nerds), i.e. they are top right of the graph.