Nerd is the Word

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“You are a Nerd!” used to be one of the most damaging things you could say to another. They weren’t fighting words. They were more of a “You’re not one of us” charge that required a “What do you mean, I play sports, and I like girls” defense. If we left it out there, the charge stuck, and we didn’t want something like that sticking to us. The word nerd has experienced quite an evolution in its relatively short shelf life, to the point that we now profess our own nerdy, intellectual interest in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math.) The word hasn’t quite made it to a-good-thing status, as we often use it in a self-deprecating fashion, but it’s no longer one of the worst things you can call another.   

If we look up the history of most words, or their etymologies, we’ll find that most of them derive from Latin, Ancient Greece, Old, Middle and Late English, The Bible, or Shakespeare. Though there is some dispute over its point of origin, the word nerd is American made. 

Some suggest nerd first appeared in Dr. Seuss’s 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo:

And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-troo
And bring back an It-kutch, a Preep and a Proo,
A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!

Others argue that any time a word, or phrase appears in an artistic venue, it was probably in circulation long before it made that appearance, as most artists, Shakespeare included, probably heard the words they used long before they brought them to the masses. After Dr. Seuss brought the word to the masses, it apparently made the rounds, as Newsweek wrote an article that stated that in 1951 Detroit, “Someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd.” By the 60s the word took off, as it began popping up all over the place in print. 

Those who state that Dr. Seuss didn’t invent the word argue, “Dr. Seuss’s Nerd appears as more of a disapproving grouch than a drip or a square.” The etymologists took that note and began digging further. They found that one of Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquist dummies was named Mortimer Snerd. Modeled on a country bumpkin, “Snerd reminded listeners of a drip, someone who is tiresome or dull, and therefore—according to 1951 Newsweek—a nerd.” 

I don’t have a personal theory regarding the etymology of nerd, but I can tell you how it penetrated the zeitgeist of my generation, and made its way into my neighborhood. Those in my demographic know where I’m headed, for they know that even if the term wasn’t born on the 70s-80s sitcom Happy Days, it was raised there. The etymology suggests that nerd might predate Happy Days by twenty years, which makes sense since the era Happy Days strove to duplicate was the 1950s. 

Those of us who have attempted to pinpoint a word, or phrase, in our personal lives, know what a difficult job etymologists have. When we hear a new word, making the rounds in our inner circle, we ask our friends, “Where did you hear that?”

No one I know says, “My friend Billy says that all the time, and I thought I’d try it out.” Everyone strives to be considered the originator, or original in a more general sense. What do they say? They say, “I’ve been saying that for decades,” or, “Dude, I’ve been saying that for years.” They do not plant a flag in the term or phrase, but there is an implicit challenge to find someone who has been saying it longer than they have. Are they being dishonest? I don’t think so. I think it speaks to the nature of words and phrases, and how we absorb them into our vernacular without conscious thought. When we hear someone use terms, phrases, or sayings once, we might take notice. “Why did you say that?” we might ask. Most of us don’t ask that, because we fear the “If you have to ask…” response. By the time we hear it a fourth or fifth time, often from a wide variety of different sources, we just start saying it. Few can remember the first time they heard them, and even fewer remember the original source, so when it comes to idioms like nerd, etymologists can only source the first time it appeared in print or on the public airwaves.  

Knurds on College Campuses

Most people aren’t interested in the history of words. If you’re at a party seeking party time conversation topics, the etymology of words might get you a lifted eyebrow, and that’s if you do it right. If you deliver what I’m about to tell you with pitch-perfect cadence, and you hit the final point without sounding too nerdy or professorial, you might get nothing more than a half-interested “Huh, I’ve never heard that before,” or some other polite response before moving onto something that interests them more. I did it last weekend. I told them about what I considered one of the most fascinating theories on the origin of nerd I’ve ever heard. I didn’t stopwatch the moment, or mentally document it in anyway, but I think I might’ve received a five-second reaction before someone changed the subject. “That’s it? That’s all I get?” That’s all I got, and I’m sure that one of them probably called me a nerd later for being so interested in something so inconsequential and nerdy. Some are interested of course, some study it so often that they’ve tried to find a way to make some money at it, and some do it so often that it’s grown into some sort of obsession. For the rest of us, it’s a casual, passing interests that serves as a momentary bridge between other topics.

If you’re one of the above, chances are you’ve found numerous academic, professorial breakdowns of the history of a word. Some of these breakdowns are so precise and exact that it’s both an illustration of how much hard work some pour into researching the information and how boring that research must be.

I’ve read through some etymologies, a number of them, and I’ve found them a useful cure for a mean case of insomnia. I understand that they are a ‘just the facts man’ information resource and hiring Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld to write for them might confuse their visitors more than anything else. I also understand that the etymologies of words are not fodder for creative writing, but if I were to put such a project together, my mission in life would be to try to breathe some life into their world to try to make them a little entertaining.

Impossible, you say? I introduce you to knurd, or as we know it nerd. Yes, nerd is the word, but one particular outlet posited a theory on the origin of the word that feeds into my notion that just because we’re involved in a scientific study of word doesn’t mean it has to be nerdy.

Nerd is the word we know and love today, and this theory states that the word began on college campuses with college students engaged in the time-honored pursuit of most college students of finding the best way to insult one another.

Quick, other than insulting one another, what’s the most popular activity on college campuses for those who try their hardest to avoid activities that add to the population, or subtract from it? If you were on the Family Feud, your first guess, and the number one answer would be … survey says, “Drinking alcohol.” College students drinking alcohol can, of course, subtract from and add to the population, but those results are rarely the goal. The goal, now that they’re on their own for the first time in their lives, is to try to find the best way possible to disappoint their parents. Drinking massive amounts of alcohol could also be said to be one of the top two ways to do something college students have wanted to do since they were five, run away from home, and they/we think the best way to do that is by destroying the brain cells that remember their childhood.

We’re all now coached to think that drinking alcohol leads to awful things, and it can, but it’s also fun, and it can lower the restraints of our inhibitions. (*Pot might accomplish similar elements, but I wasn’t part of that world.) Alcohol also provides a reason for college students to get together, i.e. parties, and the more they drink, the more fun they have, so they drink to excess. They get drunk, they love every minute of it, and they don’t want to feel guilty about it. The Poindexters of the world, talking about being responsible and reminding them that they’re wasting their college years by drinking so much alcohol that they may not be able to remember much of what they were supposed to learn that week, are the enemy. They’re responsible young men, and the only thing college students hate more than their parents, or the other authority figures in their lives, are responsible young men.  

Responsible students see college as an institution that might be able to provide them the opportunity for a better future, and they fear that drinking too much alcohol might affect their academic performance. This drives drinkers crazy, because their goals are the exact opposite of those who go to college to learn stuff to prepare for the life beyond.

Most drinkers won’t say, “Who gives a crap about the future. I live for the now.” Most people, regardless of age, aren’t that bold, but they loathe responsible students who remind them of their failings in this regard. 

This theory suggests that the drunks on college campuses loathed responsible young men so much that they developed a pejorative to describe those who wanted to refrain from drinking alcohol. They called them knurds. Knurd, as you’ll note, is drunk spelled backwards. Knurd is spelled different than the current incarnation of the word, but all idioms, pejorative names, and terms that penetrate the zeitgeist go through a life cycle in which their meanings progress and change (Think bad, gross, and sick), and some of the times the spelling of these words change. There is no evidence to prove, or disprove, the knurd theory, but it makes so much sense that it appeals, in so many ways, to those of us who enjoyed getting drunk in college and unwittingly carried on the tradition of calling those who didn’t a knurd.  

We all know a nerd. Some of us knew so many nerds, and we liked them so much that we’ve just realized that there’s probably a reason we preferred being in their company so much. We were never a knurd, but we were nerds, are nerds, and forever will be, but within the ever-elastic definition is the prototype. We might not have known the history of the pejorative, but we don’t need to read through an etymological history to know a nerd when we see one. When we hear the word now, we picture the prototype: Oily hair, parted down the middle; a short-sleeved shirt, well pressed, with a pocket protector in the pocket of the shirt, loaded with pens, pencils; horn-rimmed glasses (I wore a pair in grades 1-5, thanks Mom!), a pre-pubescent squeak to his voice (and it’s almost always a male), and an overall uncomfortableness that leads them to avoid eye-contact. We all knew someone who fit the parameters, but did we create these extreme parameters to create a little distance for ourselves?  

For all the nerds who went through its first unkind forty plus years, the last twenty have been more kind to them, as the word nerd has undergone a redefinition and a certain renaissance that cannot be denied. The pejorative has progressed from the worst thing you could call someone, to people dropping it casually to describe their unique obsessions, and onto it being a compliment used to describe the erudite and computer-oriented who know how to code and eventually used that knowledge to develop AI to change everything from our TVs, to our kitchen appliances, and our cars. Who would’ve guessed that in a classroom filled with jocks, popular and cool kids, and various incarnations of the class clown that it would be the socially awkward, painfully shy, prototype Poindexter, in the quiet back corner of the room, that we’d all grow up and want to be? 

Bedbugs, Ballads, and the Bubonic Background

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The father-to-son relationship used to be so different, if we are to believe the definition they put out. I don’t know how much of it is true, but I know my dad revered his father. What changed?

Did we change this dynamic, or did our dads? The dads on those old fifties and sixties shows never had a hair out of place, and they wore a suit and tie a lot, even to dinner. It’s TV, idyllic images, all that. I got it, but if you talk to grown men from my dad’s generation, you’ll hear them talk about how different things were in their day. We all make fun of such talk now, but things were so different back then. They revered their fathers. The respect their fathers demanded led their sons to respect the people, places, and things around them. They respected personal property. I had no respect for other people’s property. I had no idea why our neighbor, Sam, kept yelling at me for stepping on his lawn. It’s grass, why do you care? They wore suits to work, to church, on airplanes, and at restaurants.

I’m not sure if my dad owned a pair of underwear that didn’t have at least one stain. I’m pretty sure he didn’t buy them that way. He just missed his opportunities so often that he didn’t have one 100% clean pair of underwear in his wardrobe. I also think he committed every violation of social decorum he could think up on an ear of corn. He’d breathe through his nose while eating it, he had to, because he’d suffocate if he didn’t. There were a couple of occasions when our eyes met, while he was doing it. It was so uncomfortable. “Take it easy on that thing Dad,” I said. “It’s not trying to get away.” Why would I strive to be this man? I often wondered. Did my dad’s dad violate standards and practices as often as he did, or did I call my dad out for his violations far more than he ever would his dad, a man he revered and respected? Who changed the father-to-son dynamic?

“Life isn’t all jokey jokey,” my dad would say to try to discourage me from joking around all the time. I sought the humorous side of life, the “jokey jokey” side. My son gets tired of all of jokes. Will he seek contrast? Will he be a more serious man? If a dad is geared to the more serious side, will the son instinctually seek the more serious? Is this specific dynamic born from the more general dynamics of the father-to-son relationship, because the son grows up laughing at the dad, or if the dad is such a jokester the son seeks to take life more seriously?

The one talent my dad had for humor was his ability to fart on demand. We all know farts. Some are more silent gastric releases and others fit the dictionary definition of “an explosion between the legs”. My dad did the latter so often that I often wonder if his talent was one of the primary reasons I had so many friends. They didn’t get in line to hear them, but once he started in, they didn’t want to leave our house. “This is funnier than anything on TV,” they agreed. 

“How many times do you have to hear farts until they’re not funny anymore?” I asked them. It was an endless source of amusement to them, and my dad loved it as much as they did. He built material around his gastric releases. “I just blew her a kiss,” was his favorite line. He said that after he accidentally let a loud one go on an innocent, unsuspecting woman in a grocery store, and my friend was laughing so hard he couldn’t walk right for minutes. When I told my friend to stop laughing, “You are only encouraging him.” He said his laughter wasn’t about the fart as much as the wounded expression of the woman my fifty-something my dad farted on. I didn’t see her as the punchline of a joke, but as a fellow victim of his violations of standards and practices.

Dad also learned what he considered an award-winning phrase, following any expulsion of gas from his intestines, “Better to let it out and bear the shame than hold it in and bear the pain.” It kind of rhymed, so Dad considered it the literary equivalent of Robert Frost or Shakespeare. It was as close as my dad ever came to citing poetry. I don’t know who came up with that phrase, but I’d have fantasies of doing vile, disgusting things to them, and I am not a violent man. I don’t view violence as a way of dealing with confrontation, but after decades of hearing that phrase, I developed some empathy for those desperately seeking to find a way to end their pain. I’ve heard some talk about getting in a time machine to kill Hitler to save humanity from what he inflicted upon so many in the world at the time. I’ve thought the same about the originator of this phrase. Whenever my dad would say it, my friends would just devolve to gales of laughter, and those vile, disgusting thoughts of violence seemed like a final solution to me.

When they’d turn to me with their laughter, I basically said, “I find him absolutely vile.” That’s right, for a portion of my life I played the priggish, old woman to my dad’s Rodney Dangerfield character in a movie. If you’ve ever seen one of Rodney’s old movies, a rich, snobbish old woman would say, “I find him utterly repulsive,” with her nose up in the air. Rodney would say, “It’s a party, loosen up babe.” To which the woman would punctuate her disgust with some final chuff of revulsion. My dad was the Dangerfield character who stuck his thumb up the arse of the institution, and I was his institution. 

I heard so many farts by the time I hit my teens that I could no longer find humor in the fart as a teenage boy. Does that strike you as profound, because how many teenage boys love to fart, hear a great fart, and break up a room with a well-placed explosion between the legs? I missed out on all those traditional teenage fart jokes when I was a teen, because I considered the fart joke tired by the time I hit junior high.

I was so tired of the fart joke that I missed out on what many agree is the funniest fart joke of all time, the nun letting one go in church. This nun was our teacher, and she was every bit the prim and proper nun. What she let go was powered by the physical exertion of going from the kneeling position to the sitting position. It was loud, it was during a service, and I was sitting right next to her. That’s funny now, right? To 99.9% of the pre-teen, male demographic that’s not just funny, it’s once-in-a-lifetime, you-had-to-be-there hilarious. Church is one of those places where every pre-teen gets the giggles over the dumbest stuff, but a nun farting in church might qualify as the most shockingly hilarious event in a pre-teen boy’s life, and to the 99.9% contingent, it is. There is a .1% of grade school-era boys, however, a grouping who have heard so many farts in life, so many fart jokes, and so much fart laughter that our reservoir of fart laughter is so dried up that we can’t even smile at a prim and proper nun farting in church. We know each other too, we .1 percenters. We spot one another, down the pew, and we nod one of those closed-eye nods, amidst all the other students gasping for air though laughter. It’s the we-have-the-same-dads nod. We’re members of this very exclusive club we wanted no part in, so we smile and force laughter, all the while knowing that our flatulating fathers deprived us of our golden era of the fart joke. 

Don’t Let the BedBugs Bite

“My mom was an unusual person too. She had quirks, but thanks to her bizarre husband, we considered her quirks unremarkable. She had her own unusual sayings and traditions. The traditions she learned and passed down had nothing to do with farts, or anything as revolting as my dad’s. She was our version of a normal person, and we needed her dose of normalcy to combat everything being thrown at us. She used to read to us every night, she tucked us in, and gave us one of her sweet, motherly kisses before heading to the door. Then, right after she told us how much she loved us, and before she closed the door she’d say, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” 

“I didn’t really think about what bedbugs were back then, as it was just something my mom said to me every night since as far back as I knew. I’ve never been a big interpreter either, as evidenced by the fact that when I would tell a friend I like a song, they would say, “Do you know what that song is about?” I wouldn’t say that I never cared, as I’m sure I did when I was younger and trying to fit in, but I never cared so much that it changed my opinion about the song. I’ve always kind of had this sense that artists who wrote deep, meaningful and powerful lyrics were trying to convince everyone how smart they were. My appreciation of music has always been that the lyrics should fit the music, nothing more and nothing less. Save the deep meaning for your college thesis. As a result of this mindset, I didn’t bother to ask my mom what bedbugs were for a long time. When I did, and she explained it to me, I wondered if there were tiny, little bugs crawling all over my bed and my body? Is this common, and what do we have to do to prevent them from biting me? She didn’t intend to introduce this horrific thought into my already creative mind. She thought this familiar, little rhyme conveyed sentiment. I love you, and have a good night’s sleep. Oh, and don’t let the bedbugs bite. This was my mom’s idea of punctuating love. She did it so often that by the time I started thinking about what it was she was saying, it was already an accepted part of our parting ritual at the end of a night. I also think she just liked the phrase, because it rhymes, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” 

“What I didn’t know until I researched it is that fossils and early writings discovered that bedbugs date back to ancient Egypt and Rome and industrialization and immigration brought them to America. So, when ancient Egyptians issued such warnings, they meant it. The mattresses they slept on were veritable breeding grounds, made of straw and feathers, and those mattresses were held up on a series of latticework ropes. The origin of the phrase sleep tight was probably made in reference to the parents warning their children to make sure those ropes were tightened to prevent sagging. If they didn’t tightened their ropes, the fear was bedbugs would find a way onto and into their mattresses. Bedbugs cannot jump or fly, but they didn’t know that. Another theory speculates that sleep tight referred to parents telling their children to keep their pajamas tightly wound to prevent bedbugs from getting in, but all these theories involve speculation over the origin of the phrase. The point though is that it’s possible that some form of this phrase could be hundreds to thousands of years old. 

“If we took a step back to realize what we’re now saying about bedbugs, before we close the door to immerse our kids in total darkness, where their unusually creative minds spin just about everything we say into some form of horror that causes them insomnia and nightmares, we might want to give some thought to ending the tradition that suggests these nasty, little germ-ridden insects are probably going to bite us unless … unless they somehow don’t let them. That’s a question I never asked “How do I go about not letting them mom?” Seriously? “Are there proactive, preventative measures we should be employing here, and why are you letting me to do this alone? You’re supposed to be the parent, the protector and defender, or something other than the door closer who wishes me luck against these things.” Isn’t this basically what we’re saying when we say, good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite? We’re saying that we’ve found all of our proactive, preventative measures pointless, and you’re kind of on your own here, sweetie. Love you! Now, good night, and don’t let them bite. Slam! Is this why Joey developed that cute, little habit of sleeping with his Mattel sword and shield? Is he preparing for battle? 

“My mom never gave any thought to what she was saying, it was just a tradition that her mother passed down to her, and she passed down to us. These traditions are an inner node of our family tree that we consciously, and subconsciously, use to connect to that family tree, and it’s their way to thoughtlessly define love. There’s also that added ingredient, in some weird and inexplicable way, that we see as a definition of quality parenting. We don’t think about it. We just do it. It’s a set of parental instructions or system of rules written into our code and our peculiar programming language. It’s as much a part of our fabric as familial tales of our cranky old uncle swearing every time he has to stand up, the way our grandpa makes noises when he sits, and playing cars with our cousins on kitchen tile in our pajamas.   

Ring Around the Rosie

“These generations-old, odd traditions that influence and enhance who we are surfaced when I picked my kid up from school. Some kids, somewhere on the playground, began singing the borderline horrific song Ring around the Rosie. Everyone knows this singalong song, right? Why do we all know it, and who taught these kids this tradition? We did. Who taught us? We just sort of pick it up from somewhere, and no one remembers where. It’s a tradition that was, is, and probably will always be around. I smiled fondly when I heard them sing it. Ring around the Rosie, sing it with me now, pocket full of posies, ashes ashes, we all fall down. 

“Apparently, there are numerous versions of this song sung around the world, and some of you might know a different one, but that’s the one we sang in my pocket of the world. For as many versions as there are, there are nearly as many interpretations of the lyrics. As kids we sang it just to sing something while we did something else, but some folklorists suggest the lyrics ‘ring around the rosie’ might have developed as a result of kids teasing other kids when they spotted a red owie on their arm. Any owie, I assume, was subject to ridicule, and if you know a kid, you know they can get bruises, bumps, and red spots anywhere. They can get them after a rough session on the playground or walking through an aisle at Walgreen’s. “Where did you get that bruise on your arm? Joey” “I don’t know,” and they don’t. They really don’t. It’s as much a mystery to them as it is to you.  

“When one of these 1665-era kids of London spotted an owie on one of their friend’s arm, they sang Ring Around the Rosie to tease him to ostensibly inform him that he might want to consider the idea that he might have …. the plague. The plague! Some call it The Great Plague of London, others called it Black Death, and historical chroniclers suggest it was the last major epidemic of The Bubonic Plague in England. Some trace the origin of this little song to this Bubonic Plague that slaughtered over 100,000 Londoners at the time, and the total population of London, at the time, was around 460,000. So, it killed nearly one in four Londoners. 

“Ring around the Rosie! Yeah, we saw your little owie, Joey, and we’re pretty sure that means when the bearer-of-the-dead comes around screaming “Bring out your dead!” we’re going to be pitching your body in, so he can throw your body in one of the local burning, plague pits. 

So many people were dying from the plague that the various locales couldn’t keep up. Those of us from an area of the country that can be affected by wintry conditions know that there are times when police won’t respond to minor car accidents. They tell citizens to exchange information, and drive on. This is what was happening in 1665-England. If a loved one died, the family would wait till nightfall and put the body of their loved one in a bearer-of-the-dead’s cart. He would stroll through the night with his agricultural cart, yelling out, “Bring out your dead!” as fans of Monty Python’s 1975 movie Holy Grail know. When his cart was full, the corpse carrier would take his load to a plague pit to burn and bury the corpses. 1665 England didn’t bother with funerals, ceremonies, caskets, or graves. There were just too many corpses in too short a time. So, unless the citizen had the money to get a proper service, their family threw their corpse in a plague pit, and we can only guess that little Joey probably saw a few of his cousins, aunts, and friends thrown onto the corpse carrier’s cart or into the pit.

We all use various defense mechanisms to deal with the horror happening around us, and kids are more sensitive to the horrors happening around them, thus more confused about how they should prevent the horror from getting inside their head. To accomplish this, they developed this cute and brutal little rhyme to suggest that their friends –or that kid who sits two seats up and to the right in class — to let Joey know he is headed for the burning corpse pit soon. And if the interpretations of these lyrics are anywhere close to the historical truth, we think the lyrics are so sing songy cute that we’ve been teaching it to our kids for three hundred, plus years?

“Some folklorists further suggest that the ‘pocket full of posies’ portion of verse was used to mock those kids whose parents believed that if their Joey carried flowers in his pocket, it would prove a homeopathic remedy to prevent the onset of the plague. So, this portion of the song basically says, “Even though you had a pocket full of posies, you still caught the plague, Joey, SUCKER!” 

The conclusion of the song might be the most horrific, as the “Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down” lyrics suggest that Joey’s tormentors knew that they were going to get it too, we all will, and we’re all going to die en masse. One would think that in the wake of COVID, we should consider ending the tradition that involves a sing-a-long about catching plagues, airborne or otherwise, that could slaughter hundreds of thousands.  

“I’ve heard that the folklore surrounding these interpretations of the lyrics might not be true, but even the most obnoxious, cellphone-checking sleuths will have to admit that there’s enough speculation among folklorists who’ve examined the lyrics of the song that we should probably stop teaching it as a sweet, pleasant “singalong” rhyming song our kids can sing on a playground. I mean, how can anyone spin “Ashes ashes we all fall down?” as anything other than a relatively disturbing dystopic image? A creative, young mind might even spin the lyrics as a warning for all participants to prepare for a nuclear winter? 

***

“Almost everyone here tonight is a complex, fully formed adult who has lived through several different, complicated eras of life, met thousands of different people, and read at least a few books. Yet, we don’t know what we’re doing anymore than our parents did when it comes to parenting, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do about it. I’m sure some of you are more confident in your parenting skills, have a master plan, or whatever, but most of us are just making it up as we go along. 

Have you ever had another parent look to you as a model of good parenting? It’s unnerving. You’re looking to me as some sort of guide for good parenting? What kind of dysfunctional and confused parent must you be to look to me? Good God man, I’m a mess. My model for everything I do, as a parent, is my dad, and the only talents I know about involved breathing through his nose while eating corn and flatulating on demand. You know me. You know how I turned out. I’m this big ball of the contradictions, hypocrisies, and family traditions that involve dystopic songs and nighttime warnings of bug infestations that my parents taught me. The greatest thing my dad ever taught me was independence, and there are a vast number of merits to teaching your children how to solve their own problems, play alone, and to prepare them for the reality that they’re going to spend most of their time alone, but the constant refrain of my dad’s parenting was, “You’re on your own kid.” I learned most of the strengths and weaknesses of total independence as an eleven-year-old. The basis of my relationship with my dad was based on his three commandments: “Don’t get in trouble, keep your grades up, and don’t touch my stuff.” 

“One interesting byproduct fell out of my dad’s relatively dysfunctional definition of parenting, and that was that I learned that he didn’t care about me near as much as I thought he did. He didn’t attend my sporting events, so he wasn’t cheering me on from the stands, but he wasn’t booing either. This led me to the notion that no one else is cheering us on from the proverbial stands either. We’re on your own here. They might applaud an accomplishment of ours in the moment, but they really don’t care near as much as we think. But, and here’s the element of life it took me decades to fully comprehend, no one cares as much as you think about our failures either. It’s one thing to say people don’t care much about our success. That’s ours to love, cherish, and celebrate, and most people might give us a “Congratulations!” in the moment, but they don’t understand the full import of our accomplishment as much as they should. The epiphany my dad incidentally taught me, and I now altruistically give you is: No one cares near as much as we think they do when we fail. When we reach that point of what we consider an ultimate failure, we’re just sure everyone from our parents to that guy in the checkout line at The Supersaver knows what just happened to us. The truth is, they’re not paying near as much attention as we think. This is not only a bizarre way of thinking, it’s wrong, right? 

The fact that people don’t pay as much attention as we think, or fear, is actually documented in various psychological studies. They’ve performed tests that involved a student walking in front of a huge college classroom to interrupt a professor and ask them a question. That student, in question, was wearing one of the loudest, most awful T-shirts the researchers could find. The result, 20% of the other students noticed that shirt. When a separate but similar test was done with a student wearing the finest suit known to man interrupted a class to ask the professor a question, 10% noticed that suit. They weren’t paying attention to a display of success, but they weren’t paying attention to an epic failure either. Those reading this probably assume that they’d notice, “because I’m an observant person.” My guess is those students thought they were anywhere from observant to unusually observant, because we all do. The truth is that we’re not paying as much attention as we think, and they aren’t either. 

Some might find it depressing to learn that we’re all alone in the world, but if we turn that study around, we might find that it frees us up to try things we otherwise wouldn’t if we thought everyone was paying attention. If we latch onto the idea that no one is paying near as much attention to what we do, who we wear, or those silly jokes we tell, then just do what you do with the knowledge that no one’s really paying any attention. 

It’s Just Gross to Say it’s Gross

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“You’re just gross,” Sheila said.

“I’m gross? Me?” I asked. Sheila confirmed she was talking about me, and she went through her assessment in detail, and I … I was not insulted.

“How could you not be?” How could I be? Had Sheila called me disgusting, revolting, repellent, or even stomach-churning, my shades of embarrassment might have blossomed, but gross? Gross is gone. It just is. Overuse and abuse have drained it of all value. Everything is gross now. In the ever-changing and relative world of the new and improved hygienic standards, everyone and everything is gross now, and if everyone is gross no one is.

“If you don’t do this, you’re gross.” “Doing that is just plain gross?” “And if you do that without doing this first, you could become absolutely gross.” Some of you might find it gross, but the rest of us don’t understand how all of these this and that’s not only fail the new hygienic standards but they’re gross. How is it gross? Define gross. 

“I’m glad you asked,” an arbiter of gross once responded. “If you do this without knowledge, you’re a little icky, but we’ll withhold judgment, because you might just be ignorant, and we’ll be happy to teach you. If we teach you, and you continue to do it, you’re gross my friend, and I won’t want to be around you anymore.”

Gross, thanks to the new and improved hygienic standard, is now the most used and abused word in the English language, and we’re all scrambling to develop exciting and new uses of it. One would think that someone might step up and say, ‘Okay, I understand he failed to abide by your prescribed steps to achieving hygienic excellence in a manner you’ve defined, but he’s not gross. How is he gross?’

We all thought we had a pretty firm grasp on gross, decades ago, but something happened. There are some very insightful and well-researched explanations of the word’s evolution, but I wanted to know what influenced my friends and my generation to start using and abusing this word. I don’t know if it started in the once-ubiquitous “As Seen on TV” infomercials depicting the absolutely miserable black & white, “Before” man using a traditional mop, but I think they contributed. Before the advent of cable, there used to be shows we were “forced” to watch. Check that, we were never “forced” to watch anything, but our antidote to insomnia was mindless TV, and nothing was more mindless than those 30-minute “As Seen on TV” infomercials. To enshrine their latest and greatest product in the halls of gloriousness, the marketing teams displayed for us a reasonable facsimile of us in black and white “before” videos. We knew the anguish of the traditional mop firsthand, but we had no idea that it was the bane of human existence that might, might have been have been the second worst infliction beset upon man, behind the gods subjecting Prometheus to the sentence of having a eagle eat his liver out for the rest of time. As chilling and horrific as those “before” videos were, they were not a condemnation of man, but an invitation to join the “after” woman, in her bright, colorized visage. On this woman’s face, we could see the science behind the land of milk and honey through her incredible, beaming smile. Her beaming smile didn’t intimidate us, but it led us to believe we could join her in the land the gospels promised for living a moral life.

On another note, in the same lane, government bureaucracies informed the marketing agencies trying to develop the next, great beer commercials that they could not depict the actors  actually drinking beer in their commercials, the adjustments those teams made revolutionized marketing. It may not have been the first time a marketing team sold a lifestyle over a product, but few commercials beat you over the head with this concept as often as beer commercials. The “As Seen on TV” infomercials followed suit by selling the glorious lifestyle their product could offer by resetting the base of the traditional, laborious task of mopping to gross.

Those of us who regularly worked with traditional mops, never found them gross or that laborious, but we fell for their punctuation-free pitches that only paused for applause, and after we purchased their “As Seen on TV” mops, we found that they were not that much better. They were just different, but how do you sell ‘just different’? You can’t, so you don’t, so the only tool at your disposal is to exaggerate the differences to gross to get a reaction. The marketeers decided to go so far over-the-top that it bordered on hilarious, but somewhere deep inside your psyche, you repeated their “it doesn’t have to be this way” mantra the next time you worked with a traditional mop. You pictured yourself in black and white, and no one wants to be depicted in black and white, so you dialed that 1-800 number, because you didn’t want to be gross in the manner your black and white mothers and grandmothers were. It was such a gross exaggeration of something that was ‘just different’ that we bought it, and we’ve tried to sell ever since. We might be giving these companies too much credit for influencing the culture, or too much blame, but if there were hundreds of seeds that affected this change, this was probably one that hit fertile soil and blossomed into everything else becoming so gross. 

The origin of gross began a rather solitary existence as a term we used to describe size. A friend of mine informed me that he just purchased “a gross” of our favorite fireworks. I could tell that Mark had no idea what gross meant in this context. There was just something about the way he said it that made it sound exciting and new. It was as if he couldn’t wait to start using this word in this manner, going forward.

I laughed, but my laughter was born of confusion. He saw my confusion and clarified that gross was a term used to describe big. “There’s big, big and fat, and then there’s a gross!” he explained. I didn’t know, and neither did he, that retail fireworks shops sold their products by the gross, meaning a dozen of a dozen, or 144 items.

Gross then made its way into accounting, and if an accountant called some level of our finances gross, they were talking about our take home pay before anything else was taken out. Our gross paycheck, for example, is what our employer paid us before the government reached in and took a huge chunk of it out, so they could spend our hard-earned money on what they wanted. Net, by contrast, is what we take home after taxes and various deductions.

At another point in its evolution, gross was a superlative to describe something greater than great, but not tremendous. That’s right, according to a version of the Oxford English Dictionary, gross used to be something short of a tremendous compliment. The progression of the compliment went from good >>>to great >>> to gross >>> to tremendous. So, if someone said, “You’re just gross!” at this point in its evolution, it was almost a tremendous compliment. So, how did we take this French word to describe big, large, and fat, or the Latin word grossus, which means thick, evolve to describe something that is just short of disgusting and grotesque? Based on this context, we can only guess that when someone saw someone else who was large and fat, and they called him gross, a third party probably misinterpreted that to mean he was messy, disgusting, and all the things that are now gross.

The exact timeline on the various evolutions, or devolutions, of a word like gross are almost impossible to define, as most deviations occur in casual conversations, but we can always count on hipsters to redefine a word, such as bad being good, as in “He’s a bad man!” but who did this to gross and why? If you do any research on it, you’ll find some blame directed at everyone from Shakespeare to the movie Valley Girls. Whatever the case, we all gathered together and decided to mangle, wrangle, and tangle gross to describe everything from big, and big and fat, to crude and unsavory behavior >>> to poorly cooked food >>> to what the cat leaves in the litter box >>> to the utterly unsavory man who doesn’t use a hand towel to open a bathroom door.

“He’s just gross!” 

“Oh, I know it, and he doesn’t even seem to care.”

We all use the subtle art of manipulation, or if manipulation is too harsh a term, how about coercion to influence our peers. We know certain words elicit better reactions than others. We see this most often in the teenage world. Everything is a superlative to them. Everything has at least two audio exclamation points behind it!! We know this, because we knew it in our teens. When we hit that vulnerable valley between youth and adulthood, we do everything we can to impress our peers with our opinion. We didn’t have a firm grasp on language at the point to form quality expressions, so we substitute words to colorize our attempt to master the art of persuasion. Most of us get better at that with age, and this ardent need to impress might subside, but it never dies.

The need to get reactions and impress in the teen world can overhaul everything we’ve learned about the psychology of language, or psycholinguistics. We speak, almost exclusively, in superlatives in our teens. Everything is classic, sick, lit, and the best thing to happen to humanity and the worst. These words get reactions, and we rarely turn away from them, no matter how old we are. Even though the average adult learns 40,000 words by age 24, we cling to the teen words awesome, sucks and gross for most of our lives, because they are time-tested and peer-reviewed.   

Something awful happened to gross, on its path to overuse and abuse, but at its worst, it never made it to disgusting. As we see in the progression from yesterday, bad >>>to worse >>> to awful >>> to gross >>> to disgusting, we once had a scale by which we could rein gross in, but some of us decided to render all other adjectives obsolete. Listening to this abuse, the listener might think the founders of our language didn’t provide us with any other adjectives to describe something beyond bad, or if they did, they didn’t do a very good job to it. 

If someone says, “You know what, I think my lima beans are slightly undercooked.” Our reaction would be, “Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that?” and everyone goes back to their meal. I mean, what’s the difference between a slightly undercooked lima bean and a fully cooked one? If she says that her lima beans are gross, however, what do we do? We don’t require further description, and we don’t need to interrogate the witness. We crinkle the nose. 

The crinkled nose now plays a prominent role in the conditional social compacts we share with one another, as the purveyor of gross might deem the conspicuous absence of a crinkled nose a personal insult. When someone says their lima beans are gross, we are to offer sincere, sympathetic, or empathetic, apologies followed by a crinkled nose to punctuate that apology. We offer them this to validate their complaint and offer real, material substance to their exaggeration of a slightly undercooked lima bean. Then, if she offers further description, and it can be anything, we know this requires us to go beyond the crinkled nose to some derivative of the empathetic, “Ewww!” 

We all know the laws and bylaws of our unspoken compacts that are expected of us on a certain level, but we may not ever see them for what they are, until we experience an exaggeration. 

***

“Best onion rings in the Southwest!” a restaurant submitted in their ad. In her attempts to convince us that we should go to this restaurant, Laura told us about that ad. She knew the price of onion rings, and she knew these were overpriced, but if they were the best onion rings in the Southwest, Laura was willing to pay that price for them. 

I only knew Laura on a superficial level, but dined with her often enough to know that there was no way that those onion rings would achieve the “Best onion rings in the Southwest!” in Laura’s after-bite report. The moment she ordered those onion rings, I could feel the barometric pressure in the restaurant drop, as the complaint cloud loomed over us. I correctly predicted the precipitation cycle from Laura’s first bite to the server coming over to check on us after we received our orders. I’m not a meteorologist, but I didn’t have to be to know what happens when dark, foreboding clouds begin to form. 

As if on cue, the complaints rained down on the server after Laura took her first bite. There’s nothing wrong with a complaint of course, but Laura could’ve limited her complaint to, “I paid for the best onion rings in the Southwest, and these are not that.” She could’ve sent them back and received another plate, or another item as a substitute, but Laura opted to display her standards of excellence by putting on a show. 

In her report to the server, Laura could’ve described her plate of onion rings as room temperature, but that term has no attention-grabbing exclamation points, so what did she say? She said, “These onion rings are ice cold!” to superlative her way to the crinkled nose. The onion rings were not ice cold. We could see no ice crystals hanging off them, and there was no dry ice-like smoke wafting off them. Yet, when she finished displaying her mastery of provocative adjectives, we feared touching her onion rings the way we do dry ice, because we all know the physics behind something being so cold that it could burn. 

To further bolster her characterization, and the resultant sympathy that naturally, and contractually, follows, she added that her slightly above room temperature onion rings were, “Gross!” Was it a gross exaggeration to call them gross? Yes, yes it was, but that didn’t stop her from saying it. It doesn’t stop any of us, because we want/need those reactions. No, when Laura declared her onion rings gross, we crinkled our noses and sympathetically “Ewww’ed!” her, because we wanted to form some level of solidarity with Laura and her complaints, so she would continue to be our friend. No one would dare challenge her gross assessment, because how do you challenge another person’s subjective opinion, and why would you want to interrupt a perfectly enjoyable meal with friends by saying, “They’re not gross, Laura, they’re just a little undercooked. Send them back to the line, have the chef cook them a little longer, or get some new ones, and shut your trap!” 

Another thing we know without knowing is that gross assessments carry an unspoken quid pro quo. If we offer Laura’s gross exaggerations visual and audible support, we expect her to offer her support of our complaints if they should ever come about. Most complainers, in Laura’s league, don’t. They refuse to abide by the unspoken tenets of our social compact, or our quid pro quo, because they don’t view our complaints as significant, as germane, or as informed as theirs. We all know someone like this. They say everything from an undercooked lima bean to finding a stray French fry in their pasta is gross, or absolutely gross, and we support her to fulfill our obligations in our shared compact. When we complain about something that we might later admit is relatively inconsequential, such as, let’s say, slightly undercooked red meat. They dismiss our complaint. 

“It happens when you order red meat,” a Laura-type might say. “When you’re ordering food, particularly red meat at a restaurant, you’re allowing someone else to cook it for you, and chances are,” the Lauras of the world say, emphasizing those two words sardonically, “chances are, they’re not going to cook it to your satisfaction. Just eat it, or send it back and have them cook it more and shut your trap.” The crinkled nose we give that is not a gross one, but one of insult and confusion. 

“She doesn’t see it,” we whisper to ourselves in wonderment. “She doesn’t know that she’s one of the biggest complainers in the Southwest.” Is it that, or is her dismissal fueled by the fact that if she allows us to complain and call everything gross, unimpeded, that might somehow diminish her assessments?

If you’ve ever gone this deep into the social compact we have with others, an exaggeration like this makes it apparent to us. Yet, when we recognize it, most of us sit in silent stupor and comment on it later to those close to us. Few of us would be so bold as to say, “Hey, I crinkled my nose for you when you complained about your onion rings, and I even said “Eww!” when you wouldn’t shut up about it. I think I’ve at least earned a crinkled nose from you woman.” Not only does their very public dismissal of our complaint violate our social compact and the quid pro quo we thought we had with them, but they’re totally oblivious to all of their complaining over the years. If we wonder how oblivious some of them can be, they’ll add an “I’m sorry, I just hate complainers” atop the pie, and if that don’t crack your dam, then you have far more control of your facilities than I do. 

After hearing Laura-types use and abuse the word gross for years, I briefly considered it my prime directive in life to mount a personal campaign against the power the word wields over our public discourse. I started small and polite, but at some point, I started trying everything I could think up to limit the use of the word in my social circles, for the purpose of giving it some of its power back. My modus operandi was that if we could all get together and limit the supply, it might have a corresponding effect on its demand. I didn’t do it for self-serving reasons. I did it for the word. Even though I knew that was a self-serving lie, I made some strides in my battle against the ‘ly words, literally and actually, in my social circles, and I thought my experience in this arena might translate to some success on the battlefield against the word gross. I lost. I lost so badly that … Have you ever heard of the infamous Battle of Little BigHorn? Yeah, like Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, I severely underestimated my opponents. I was bull rushed at times, and outflanked by others. It was a bloodbath. As with Custer, my troops abandoned me, all my Captains and Majors, retreated when they saw out how outnumbered we were in our initial skirmishes, and my fight proved pointless and pitiful, even among my closest friends and family.

The word is gone, I say to you now in my after-action report (AAR). I didn’t think anyone still used the musket, and when I saw that they did, I grew over-confident, but when so many use it, it leads even the best of leaders to acknowledge that some of the times even the best laid plans should, for the sanity and happiness of everyone involved, end in retreat.