one of my longstanding interests i don't really talk about because it's very rude is "nerd theory," in the sense of having a theory of nerds: why do nerds have that voice? why don't nerds like sports? why do nerds have bad posture? why do nerds *look younger*?
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anyway i have a rough draft of a theory now, the one-sentence summary is not that complicated it turns out:
a nerd is a person who is tense all the time
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there are people who are tense all the time who are not nerds
I might rather say that nerds are intellectuals who are tense all the time
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yeah a few minutes later i was like "wait hmm a veteran with PTSD is tense all the time but not (necessarily) a nerd"
the cluster i'm interested in might be more "a person who was tense all the time growing up esp. during puberty"?
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Still think those people are not all nerds
Nerdness involves contraction of the body, granted, but it involves expansion elsewhere
The relationship between those pressures is important. It's not *just* a cope, but a pressure model of investments
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hmmmmmmhmhmhm yeah i like this
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my personal definition of nerd is “person who is driven by curiosity”, and the more curiosity influences your behavior, the bigger of a nerd you are
I think it’s common/likely for such people to be tense, but in my model it’s not like, necessarily/definitively so
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also complication is there are many people who are extremely tense all the time and are minimally curious and they are clearly not nerds
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hmm yeah there do be those people huh
people are gonna want to use the word to mean different things also - here i intended to point to a specific kind of archetype as represented in TV, movies, etc. that also tracks with a cluster of people i've met IRL
not sure what to name the other two quadrants but
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