Mar 02
Dr. Seuss is the original nerd. Okay, so maybe the guy wasn’t a real doctor (he studied for, but didn’t complete, his doctorate), but he did wear glasses, the occasional bowtie, and graduated from Dartmouth, for what it’s worth. Also, the good quasi-doctor is also credited with actually having invented the term “nerd.”
The term dates back to the 1950 publication of Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo, which features the typically Seussian “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too,” all part of Gerald McGrew’s laundry list of species for an imaginary zoo.
A year later, Newsweek offered up its more current slang definition–an apparently popular term in Detroit at the time, used to describe those of the “square” persuasion.
With this in mind, we at Gearlog would like to wish a happy 107th birthday to one of our most beloved nerds, on a boat, with a goat–wherever he deems appropriate, really.
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