There were no nerds in the 1700s. There were no nerds in the 1800s. When did nerds as a distinct social category come about?
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Replying to @MatjazLeonardis
my sense is around the turn of the 20th century when you start to get the Pragmatist philosophers and Theodore Roosevelt contrasting being a "man of action" with being a timid, weak intellectual.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @MatjazLeonardis
"intellectuals are weak and ineffectual" is an anxiety people have had since at least the time of Pericles, but my sense is that intellectuals *themselves* didn't buy into it and denigrate their own activities.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @MatjazLeonardis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscular_Christianity … seems to have started a bit earlier but is culturally related
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @MatjazLeonardis
Definitely the idea of someone who was too interested in school, too "bookish", and liable to be bullied or ostracized for this, was a thing by the late 19th and early 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald certainly takes it for granted that one doesn't want to be that.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @MatjazLeonardis
Maybe, as someone mentioned, it's not a coincidence that this coincides with the high school movement. Before that, the people who didn't like book-learning wouldn't go to school past childhood, so school was about book-learning (and moral instruction), not social adjustment.
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(obviously you can't get the science-fiction side of the nerd stereotype until science fiction is popular, so maybe 1930's and later).
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