"You can't spell Geek without double-E!" a friendly electrical engineer ( = "double-E") told me. Geekiness is a badge of honor in certain circles ... perhaps deservedly so. It's kinda neat to be really good at something that's arcane — to master a topic with huge entry barriers. Though one can, in principle, be a geek in almost any specialty (music, history, cooking, etc.) the fields which people nowadays associate with nerd-dom tend toward the technical, computers being the archetypal example.
Alas, the term "geek" has been depreciating in recent years (like the word "hacker") ... far too many folks are calling themselves geeks without having paid their dues in all-nighters and against-all-odds term projects. Perhaps it's almost time to replace "geek" with another moniker — "tweet" or "dweeb" or "beezo" or "weenie" or ...?
Whatever it is, it's gotta have double-E!
Thursday, March 30, 2000 at 19:56:42 (EST) = 2000-03-30
(correlates: MySpeciality, YearInIdeas2004, IdiosyncraticFandom, ...)