Noun. Slang. A person whose interests ALWAYS take precedence over popularity or conformity. A person who displays the willingness to bear the public shame of liking some weird thing and not caring who knows it.
– GeekDad Jim MacQuarrie
Back in a previous life, when I was studying for an A.M. in social sciences at the University of Chicago, I did some thinking about group formation. This was right at the end of the Balkans War. One of the things which becomes apparent if you study history is that it is much easier to build a group identity around who is not part of the group, than it is to actually describe why people are included in a group. So for instance, Serbians found it easier after the breakup of Yugoslavia to define what it meant to be Serbian by saying they were not like Bosnians and Croats than they did to define exactly what it meant to be Serbian. This led to conflict, even though these three ethnic groups had lived peaceably in Yugoslavia for nearly fifty years. In the same way, during the period from about 1880 to 1945 one influential way Germans understood what it meant to be a good German was by describing it as everything that wasn’t Jewish.
Before any of us starts feeling smug, we ought to remember this kind of identity formation for groups takes place all the time in small and large ways, whether that is in social groups, in business, or academia. When building a coherent group out of a disparate bunch of people it is much easier to say things like “that activity isn’t geeky” or “you aren’t a geek” than to say “this is what it means to be a geek.”