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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

"How did two nerds come to hold SPD accountable?"

Could we stop calling qualified professionals "nerds"? One of them is an independent cyber-security expert. I find it insulting. To me, nerd comes with this definition: "an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person".

The journalist should be ashamed. What is this, high school?

Edit: I find very interesting that this post was upvoted to 20, downvoted to 10 and is now back to 15. It seem that not everyone is insulted by the term "nerd" !

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Keep in mind that The Stranger is an alternative newsweekly. They run a feature called “Drunk of the Week.” Their whole shtick is, for lack of a better term, urban authenticity.

Nerd is a badge of pride. Nerd is less cooler than Geek. Nerd is more cooler than Geeks.

Nerd can mean any social rank you want.

Just let it go.

It seems indicative of hostility and disdain- an unsubstantiated dismissal.

And regardless of how you see it, plenty of people associate it with being mercilessly bullied.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc

I often hear that people should treat slurs as badges of pride, like "bastard" in Game of Thrones. Is that strategy ever successful? Can you name any group in history that managed to reclaim a slur? I can't, so that seems like a losing strategy. The winning strategy is to come up with a better sounding name for the group, and then marginalize anyone who keeps using the slur.

I think "queer" has been claimed. I haven't heard it used offensively in a long time. [EDIT: I'm not in that group, so perhaps my impressions are skewed, but twenty years ago I heard it all the time.]

Yeah, my jew friends call each other kikes and own it. They're all millionaires now.

My perception is that nerd has not only been reclaimed, it has been over-done. Even non-nerds like to "I'm such a nerd" nowadays.

I agree. The definition of nerd is: "a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious."

There's a well-established secondary definition along the lines of "a person who is very interested in technical subjects, computers, etc." as Merriam-Webster puts it.

Yes, but so does "technical expert", "computer scientist", "independent researcher" with the exception that those are not associated with bullying and stereotypes.

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