Tag archives: geek

Le Geek, C’est Chic

The Glorious 25 May, in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, is a day for wearing violets to celebrate the People’s Revolution. The 25th is also Towel Day, commemorating the life and works of Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy celebrated the towel as ‘the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have’. Furthermore, the [...]

Posted on: May 21 2013 | Posted by: | Comments: 1 | Categories: English in use, Word trends and new words | Tags: , , , ,

Embrace your geekness

Today is ‘Embrace your geekness’ day. In this article we look at the word ‘geek’, pit the geeks against the nerds, and geek out over the Oxford English Corpus – the language analysis tool used by Oxford’s dictionary-makers. The Oxford Dictionaries blog has looked at the word geek before. Of course it has: we openly [...]

Posted on: July 13 2012 | Posted by: | Comments: 6 | Categories: English in use, Word trends and new words | Tags: , , , , , ,

Are you calling me a geek? Why, *thank you*

Geek has seen an interesting transformation in meaning over the last couple of decades. The word used to be a cruel and critical label attached to clever, but socially awkward, people – such as computer or science geeks. The origin of this sense of the word can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, [...]

Posted on: March 4 2011 | Posted by: | Comments: 1 | Categories: Word trends and new words | Tags: , , ,