Geek vs. Nerd

Geeks and nerds will argue until the end of time about the difference between a geek and a nerd. After all, they are just words, and usage varies with context, community, and era. Burr Settles at Slackpropagation conducted an extremely nerdy (or geeky) word experiment by plotting the instances of certain words as they appear on Twitter, gauging how often each word appears near the words "geek" or "nerd" and plotted the frequencies on this graph. A noble experiment, to be sure, but you have to consider that Twitter itself is a community that does not necessarily represent typical geeks and/or nerds, much less all people who use the English language. Of course, you are free to classify such a quibble as either geeky or nerdy as you wish. The most sensible statement about the argument comes from xkcd, although your mileage may vary. Link -via the Presurfer