nerd, spelling, nerdiness, detail-orientation, aforesaid, the hair of the dog

'Otaku' gather to celebrate the obsessive at Nerd Nite Tokyo

BY SHANNON SCHUBERT

Intelligence and accomplishment aren't the same thing as kindness and dedication.


via Washington Post Opinions, Outlook, and PostEverything

Hollywood has told women to date nerds for decades. It’s bad advice.


Hollywood assigns moral value to nerdiness.


WASHINGTONPOST.COM

The hair of the dog

Meaning
A small measure of drink, intended to cure a hangover.
Origin
The fuller version of this phrase, i.e. 'the hair of the dog that bit me', gives a clue to the source of the name of this supposed hangover cure. That derivation is from the mediaeval belief that, when someone was bitten by a rabid dog, a cure could be made by applying the same dog's hair to the infected wound. How many people managed to get bitten again when trying to approach the aforesaid dog to acquire the hair to achieve this completely useless remedy isn't known. The knowledge of the derivation should at least put paid to the frequent 'hare of the dog' misspelling.

Business Insider Google HR Boss Says 58% Of Résumés Get Trashed Because Of One Spelling Mistake Business Insider "Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality," he says. ForGoogle — a ...

State News: Word Nerds Studying for AARP National Spelling Bee
Berthoud Recorder - CO, USA
Like many other serious spellers, she said, her preparation involves studying the dictionary for up to eight hours a day for months. ...

nerd
also n. Slang.

1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

[Perhaps after Nerd, a character in If I Ran the Zoo, by Theodor Seuss Geisel.]

nerdy nerd'y adj.

WORD HISTORY The word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (The nerd is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.) Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a regular column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerd—a square, any explanation needed?” Many of the terms defined in this “ABC” are unmistakable Americanisms, such as hep, ick, and jazzy, as is the gloss “square,” the current meaning of nerd. The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the United States in 1970 in Current Slang: “Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits.... An uninteresting person, a ‘dud.’” Authorities disagree on whether the two nerds—Dr. Seuss's small creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mail—are the same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”

nerd 
noun [C] INFORMAL DISAPPROVING
a person, especially a man, who is unattractive and awkward or socially embarrassing:
He was a real nerd in high school - I can't believe he's so handsome now.

nerdy
adjective INFORMAL DISAPPROVING
He's nice, but kind of nerdy.
These glasses make me look/feel nerdy.



aforesaid
adj.

Spoken of earlier.