Knurds!

In one of my classes, today, we got into a discussion about the word "nerd," after having read an essay by Grant Penrod called "Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate Smart Kids." In the piece, the writer claims that we, as a culture, don't respect the average intellectual and that we glorify ignorance.

We did a little quick linguistic research via smart phone and discovered that the word "nerd"  first appeared in print in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo, in 1950. There are many arguments as to the word's origins before that, though, and various college campuses and neighborhoods claim it as their own creation (there is even one theory that it came from spelling "drunk" backward, to signify someone who studies on Saturday nights instead of going to parties: "knurd."

Most people seem to agree that it was popularized by the sit-com Happy Days, as uttered repeatedly by "The Fonz."

Stupid Smart People

It's easy to be happy if you are stupid. It's harder to be happy if you are smart. It's stupid to think that you need to be sad because you are smart.

Smartness can lead you to all sorts of things, but they don't have to be the prescribed ones. (The ones, I mean, that are written into conceptual law by the movies and the rock stars.)

Lately, it has been pretty much been treated as a given, by the intellectual set, that once you get smart you need to lose faith, lose hope and lose your sincerity. A policeman gets his badge and gun and uniform on that hard-sought day; a smart person gets smartness, recieves cynicism and loses faith, because he feels he must. A smart person leaves behind his smile, but puts on the robes of sullen superiority. He sees into the world and, so, sees its dark truth; therefore, he must be sad. To be happy is to be foolish; to be happy is to be a fool who grins in the face of tragedy, the smart person thinks. Anyone who is happy, the smart person asserts, is a fool, because the Earth is wrapped up in the twine of misery as the cork core of a baseball is wrapped up in twine of a more mundane ilk.

The Sword or the Microscope?

Here, in America, we seem to have great respect for "whistle-blowers." That can be good, of course. If someone steps up to point out corruption or unfair practices, it can be quite the heroic act. Whistle-blowers sometimes put themselves at risk of losing their jobs or even more, in some cases.

But I'm afraid of one thing: that some young people seem to be equating the finding of fault with being intellectual, courageous and perceptive. In other words, intellectuality (which, in recent years, has continued to dress itself from the wardrobe of cynicism) is now seen by many young folks as a sword instead of as a microscope -- as a weapon to hone for attack instead of an instrument for seeking truth.