Birth of the nerd

In interviews about the book, Pegg has explained the title as a play on the etymology of nerd. Last month on the public radio show “The Sound of Young America,” he said, “It does come from the phrase ne’er-do-well - that’s where the word is derived from - it was just shortening of that, which then became ne’erd and then nerd, meaning someone on the fringe of society.”

However, Pegg’s seemingly authoritative claim lacks even a shred of historical evidence. It’s just one of many fanciful theories that have cropped up to explain the origin of nerd - and one of the least plausible. The shiftless ne’er-do-well is a far cry from the studious stereotype of the nerd. But Pegg’s folk etymology goes to show how even a perfectly familiar word like nerd can be wrapped in mystery, despite our best efforts to unearth its roots.

Though nerd has been a part of American slang for 50 years now, speculation about the word’s origin began brewing in the 1980s. (The 1984 film “Revenge of the Nerds” had put nerds on the map, albeit in highly cartoonish fashion, and presaged the rise of “nerd pride.”) In a 1987 column in PC Magazine, John C. Dvorak gathered together a number of proposed etymologies of nerd, including the ne’er-do-well shortening, and shot them down one by one as mere conjecture.

Several of Dvorak’s readers figured nerd had something to do with Mortimer Snerd, the dummy used by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen beginning in the late 1930s. More creatively, others theorized that it was first spelled knurd, which is drunk spelled backwards. One graduate of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute reasoned that a knurd “studied all the time, got all A’s, and never took part in parties or activities. He was always sober, hence the inverse of drunk.”

Nerd has also been explained as a variation on nert, surfer slang for a nut. (The frustrated interjection nerts!, from the early ’30s, is a similar play on nuts.) Another theory has it originally spelled as nurd, suggesting a combination of nut and turd. And then there are the acronyms, always a popular source of faux etymology – for example, “Neurotic Engineers in R&D.”