The Geek vs Nerd debate

One difficult thing about learning languages is translating. It may seem easy to translate everything when you’re a beginner, but at some point you start finding lots of terms with subtle shades of meaning and therefore without a straightforward correspondence. Why? Because language is culture, and culture doesn’t usually give names to unknown things in its surroundings – or not known yet.

So when people ask us: “How do you say ‘geek‘ /giːk/ in Spanish?“, the answer is “We don’t have a word for that“, so we: a) simply use the word ‘geek’; b) try to make up a fairly close synonym (maybe ‘friki‘ /ˈfrɪk.ɪ/?); or c) just explain what we’re talking about.

If you decide to employ ‘geek’ as it is, it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the meaning. If you go for the second option, the problem gets even bigger when you use that same Spanish synonym for another word in English: ‘nerd‘ /nɜːd/. So today we’ve decided to go for the third option and shed some light on the geek vs nerd debate. The following infographic by MastersInIt.org will give us a hand. 

From: MastersInIt.org

We hope the difference between a geek and a nerd is now crystal clear, or at least clear enough for you to take sides. By the way, this infographic makes for an excellent vocabulary builder. Check the meaning of the key expressions here: pdf file.

And just before we finish, we have a confession to make: we’re a bit of a language geek* at The English Cam.

[*Note that here we use geek as a synonym for a person who is very interested in a field, in our case, language learning. So we can never take for granted that all geeks are technology geeks. Now tell us, how much of a geek are you? How many different types of geeks can you think of?]