Yes and no. I think this gets quite complicated, really.
For one thing, I think there’s been some semantic drift, in that “nerd” now seems to be an expression for anyone in a STEM career or for anyone who is smart, and knowledgeable about a specific subject.
My understanding is that “nerd” began, roughly in the late 50s, as a pejorative expression describing engineers, scientists, and technicians – socially maladroit, politically naive, conformist, highly skilled, privileged specialists. This was extended to describe young adults, adolescents, and children, who resembled them and were expected to follow similar career paths.
The older depictions of nerds that I can recall tended to emphasize that they were privileged and loathe to defy authority on which they were dependent. Later on, when you start to see heroic hackers in popular fiction, there’s some implicit irony – of all people, this person is the rebel?
In reading accounts of Asperger’s Syndrome, I’ve thought that there’s such a close match between common characteristics of people with AS and commonly mocked attributes of nerds, that perhaps “nerd” should be understood as originally a pejorative term for people with Asperger’s Syndrome. Except, now that I’m considering it, it seems to describe a subset of those with AS: those who were privileged and groomed from childhood to be specialists in STEM careers.
One thing I found disturbing, in reading about Asperger’s Syndrome, is that it’s very common for people with AS to be victims of bullying – and that bullies, often, are also people with AS.
I have a lot of painful memories of being bullied as a child. One thing that strikes me, now that I reflect on it, is that often the bullies resented my relative privilege: I was, notoriously, a teacher’s pet, coddled and praised. And my best response to bullying was always to run to the authorities for protection. Oh, and I was white, and lower middle class – the poorest of the rich kids, the people in the college-prep classes in my public school.
I certainly don’t want to claim that bullying me was justified. But, I have to consider that they had good reason to resent me. They have perceived that they were like me, but were denied the opportunities I was being given.
So, I think that a lot of people who self-describe as nerds did experience bullying. But, there’s a fair amount of denial of how much privilege they have and how others have been denied that privilege.
Please tell me that cop is going to jail for a very long time?