Query on Word History, was Re: The Moral Life of Geeks

John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com
Wed Sep 13 02:27:07 PDT 2000



>"Geek" originally meant a carnival performer who bit
>the head off of chickens or snakes. How did it come
>to mean professionals in technology?
>
>Carrol

Geek only refers to helpdesk people, windows sysadmins, and the people who come to your cubicle to install Office upgrades.

Unix admins prefer to be called wizards. Skilled expert programmers like to be called gurus.

Programmers, after some time, start calling themselves "coders" to express their sense of alienation from the product of their labor.

"Software engineers" call themselves "programmers", especially in the presence of civil engineers, whose jobs seem more macho.

MCSEs call themselves "admins" or "MCSEs", but that's only to fight that nagging sense that the unix wizards are chuckling at them and writing mean posts to alt.sysadmin.recovery.

There are an elite class of technical managers that call themselves "geeks" to sound "cool", and to hide the fact that their employees call them the "fuckin clueless VP/CTO". --

-------------------------------------- John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com, johnk at firstlook.com



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