theory_of_nerdy_names epitome of incomprehensibility What makes a name nerdy? And why have I thought so much about this?? Answer to the second: for fun. So, back to the first. I came up with five characteristics that can contribute to the nerdiness of a name (disclaimer that this is highly subjective, but yes): 1) Its sound, esp. if it's long, bouncy or clunky 2) Its meaning, esp. if it's booky 3) Perceived old-fashionedness 4) Potential gayness 5) Stereotypes about its place of origin (national, ethnic, cultural, etc.) Have I itsed and it'sed rightly? Okay. Onwards. ... 1) Benedict Cumberbatch. Engelbert Humperdinck. Dual dactyls? Maybe this is like seeing the number 23 everywhere, but there's also Malachi Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus' goofy sidekick in Ulysses. He calls himself Buck when he wants to look cool. It's because he's hopped across the multiverse and read what I've written here. "I said the dactyl thing before you," he crows, because he's now a crow. Why? I don't know. On to part 2. 2) The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, may it live in infamy, has a character called Booker. A reference to Booker T. Washington that also has the word book in it? Bring it on! Books are nerdy. So is naïve enthusiasm; the comic Dumbing of Age has a Dorothy Keener. 3) Comics? See Archie, an archetype. Like King Arthur, which is why king_arthur_and_archie overlap so much. Names that seem old-fashioned: Reggie would be nerdier if he went by Reginald, but Dilton Doiley takes the lace, with both of his names crotchety. Dilly-dallying, crochet. Ethel sounds a little mothball-like, but I had to look up her last name. Muggs? Doesn't hold me up and steal the nerd spotlight. Harry Potter has plenty of first-name examples - Hermione, Minerva, Percival - but that's getting into Britishness a little as well as history and legend. The British part might be covered in section 5. We'll see. 4) To go back to the Archie characters, note that Ethel's relatively tall and flat-chested, while Dilton's shortness gets feminized. A dainty doily boy. So you could say something about nerdiness being queer-coded or gender-bending, but I feel like this needs more study. And I'm already using up too many hyphens. The hyphen collector is knocking at my door. "I need a line," she moans. "And don't give me dashes this time, they're not the saaaame." 5) We leave our hyphen-addicted neighbour and go to The Big Bang Theory, where nerd stereotypes and ethnic stereotypes intersect. And you thought they didn't do intersectionality! ("Oh no," Ace Virtueson complains. "This is getting too woke. We need to go back to Christian mores, which are like s'mores but without the backmasked possessive apostrophe, which is of the devil. THE DEVIL!!") Anyway. Raj Koothrappali. See, I didn't just watch the show because Kunal Nayyar is the most beautiful man in the world, I also studied the nerdiness of his character's name. It's long. It's hard. It's...stop it. I'll get Ace Virtueson turned on with all these apostrophes. Unlike the hyphen collector, he won't admit his addiction. With a little more seriousness now: if any national/ethnic group is treated as stereotypically nerdy in American media, it's probably Chinese people. Buut they tend to have short names, and longer names sound nerdier. So we go to India. Or we don't, but we pretend we did. It's not just Asia. Booker from 2)? TV Tropes has "Black and Nerdy." But it was Weird Al who did White and Nerdy, and Weird Al has (or had) more hair than TV Tropes. At least, I assume websites don't have hair. So we go to Big Bang's Howard Wolowitz, whose last name also recalls 2) and maybe 4) with the "wallow" (wallow sounds gay, in a lulling willowy way). And it's supposed to be Jewish. Cultural association with bookishness? TV Tropes (hairy or not) *specifically* has a page called Jewish and Nerdy. It doesn't have one called Greek and Nerdy (it should be Greek and Geeky, IMO), but I think -polis names get this about as much as -witz names. For instance. For this, I need to go farther than the Big Bang, to hop universes. There we go. Witness Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries. Okay, so she's the princess of imaginary Genovia, but doesn't "Thermopolis" sound Greek? Even if Mia is Italian. Translation: My Warm City. Like My Big Fat G(r)eek Wedding? Toula Portokalos has a similar makeover deal, from nerdy to nerdy AND pretty. Bah. These things are boringly predictable sometimes. British. Now, I'm too tired to convince you that British people are nerdy, so you'll have to let Benedict Cumberbatch do that for me. Where is he? Is he giving hyphens to my neighbour? Oh no, oh no, it's semicolons now. Semicolons filled with helium. This can't end well. 250609 ... ovenbird This was so elucidating and amusing and fun to read! I think you're on to something here! 250610 ... e_o_i Thanks! This was sillier than I meant it to be, but there seem to be a few patterns to the names given to "nerdy" characters in fiction... ...as well as some cultural stereotypes, both positive or negative, about what it means to be a nerd. I didn't talk about age or gender much, because it didn't seem that related to names, but "nerdiness" also used to be centered around boys or young men. Nerd vs. jock? Geek life vs. Greek life. Or not "vs." all the time, because didn't Aristotle teach Alexander the Great? Both Greek, though - it's just that Aristotle was less of a frat boy. 250611 what's it to you? who go blather from