Geek, dork, or nerd?

I was waiting on line at the Ziegfeld Theater on West 54th Street for a Sunday afternoon show of Revenge of the Sith, having arrived three hours before showtime in order to save a good spot for my later-arriving pals, and now they had finally turned up. My pal Gail (her site is A Million Things That Bug Me on the "geeks with blogs" roll) was wearing her "geek." t-shirt, I was castigating myself as a dork for having gotten to the theater so early that there were only half a dozen people ahead of me, and we were all wondering what kinds of nerds in costumes were lined up way back where we couldn’t see them.

Which inevitably prompted a discussion about the shades of difference in meaning between "geek" and "dork" and "nerd" -- because there’s nothing geekier than splitting those kinds of hairs. And since everyone uses these words to mean lots of various and often contradictory things, it’s worth my setting down how I’ll use them here, and how I try to use them in everyday conversation.

Geek is entirely positive, as far as I’m concerned. To be a geek is to enjoy a self-awareness of one’s obsessions, but it’s more that, too: it’s to enjoy everything that goes with being a geek. I’m never ashamed of being a geek...

...Except when I am, and then I label myself a dork. There’s self-awareness that goes along with being a dork, but also a bit of embarrassment. At those moments when I haven’t quite fully absorbed the paradigm shift that goes along with celebrating geekiness, and I feel momentarily like a bit of a weirdo, dork does the trick, even if the trick is being mean to myself.

I can never be a nerd, in my glossary, however, because a nerd has absolutely no awareness of his or her nerdiness. If you think you’re a nerd, you are, by my definition, emphatically not one. To be a nerd is to embody all the stereotypically negative attributes of the geek -- poor social skills, pathological obsession with trivia, and so on -- and none of the positive ones, which involve living an examined life and having a lot of intellectual fun while doing it.

So, to use the waiting-on-line for-Star Wars metaphor, I may well have felt like a dork for waiting for three hours for a damn movie I’d already seen twice before, but because I did it for my friends, some of whom were Sith virgins, I can safely consider it nicely geeky. But that guy on line ahead of me, who had the "Imperial March" as the ringtone on his cellphone? He may well have been a nerd. But only if he was using the ringtone unironically.