Heard that “Selfie” was word of the year? It certainly is if you ask the poll run by the Oxford Dictionaries. As it happens Collins Dictionary also has a word of the year contest and although it also had its fair share of new social-lingo; they didn’t win.
Geek won Word of the Year in the Collins’ contest, beating off competition from “Twerking”, “Bitcoin”, “Phablet”, “Plebgate” (you’d need to be British to get that one, right?), “Fracker”, “Cybernat”, “Thigh gap”, “Olinguito”, “Black Friday”, “Payday lending” and the “Harlem Shake”.
If you don’t approve of “Geek” winning word of the year then at least be thankful that the body police didn’t win with “Thigh gap”.
Is it all good for geeks at Collins, though? Probably… but it’s worth noting that the dictionary rewrote the definition of geek from being “someone preoccupied with or knowledgeable about computing” to “a person who is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific subject”. I don’t mind computing getting pushed back a little – after all, I consider myself to be an anime geek, gamer geek and a whole load more types of geek. Does that mean I’m knowledgeable about anime? I don’t think so. I know what I like but that doesn’t mean I can recognise voice actors by ear or animators by style.
This is the secondary definition of geek too. Until 2003 Collins’s only had one entry for the word and that definition remains in the dictionary even if it has now officially fallen into position two. What is it? “A boring an unattractive social misfit”.
We’ve got people complaining of “fake geeks” trying to be fashionable all the while with some still using the word “geek” to mean unfashionable. That’s exactly the sort of paradox geeks notice, you know.
Geek Natives; I predict more definition repositioning around our culture by the end of 2014. What do you think?
