When I was assigned this review, the editor wrote me a note: "I hope you don't take offense at this, but your name sprang to mind as a reviewer for a book on nerds."

I probably qualify as a nerd because, among other things, I wrote a book about reading the encyclopedia -- an activity that's up there on the dorkiness scale with speaking Elvish over ham radio.

But take offense? Not at all.

Perhaps in high schools where quarterbacks still sit atop the social hierarchy, the word "nerd" continues to damage egos. But in adulthood, it's lost much of its sting. In fact, we live in a golden age of nerd-dom. As David Brooks pointed out in the New York Times last month, self-confident nerds are taking over culture: the Google founders, even Barack Obama, who can be seen as the nerdy alternative to President Bush's swaggering jock.

And now, as with any movement, the geek crowd has gotten its own cultural history, in Benjamin Nugent's entertaining and intelligent American Nerd. Nugent begins with his definition of the nerd. Nerds, he writes, are people who remind others of machines. They aren't quite robots, but they aren't quite human either. They are passionate about a technical topic, they speak in formal English, they favor logic over emotion, and they avoid confrontation.

The word "nerd" was coined by Dr. Seuss in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, in which he wrote "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!" The word seeped into the culture, first popping up on college campuses, then via TV shows such as "Happy Days" and "Saturday Night Live." But the nerd archetype has been around since at least the 19th century, long before any human uttered the N-word. The roots, says Nugent, can be traced to the rise of industrialism and the "romantic reaction against science/machinery." Culture began to embrace a "perceived split between sensuality and reason." Smart and sexy drifted apart.

The nerd-bashing, Nugent argues, was later fueled by such developments as the rise of physical education, immigration and "Muscular Christianity." The era of Teddy Roosevelt, college football, robust health and outdoorsiness had little tolerance for effete bookworms.

The most fascinating parts of the book are those that deal with the interplay between nerdiness and ethnicity. Nugent argues that racism comes in two forms: stereotyping an ethnicity as too animalistic and sensual (for instance, Africans) or portraying them as sexless and machine-like (such as Jews and Asians). Nerdism, in other words. "If a propaganda artist of the Third Reich had time-traveled to 1984 and watched Revenge of the Nerds, he might have interpreted the hero, Louis Skolnick, as a traditional age-old caricature of a Jew, and Ogre and his band of overwhelmingly blond-haired and blue-eyed jocks as the image of ideal Aryans."

Likewise, Asians were portrayed in minstrel shows as "John Chinaman," who was always losing his girlfriends to white men. John Chinaman survived nearly intact in Long Duk Dong from the 1984 teen movie "Sixteen Candles," frightening and repelling Molly Ringwald by calling her "hot stuff."

Nugent says that nerds shy away from confrontation, which may be why I have nothing vitriolic to say about the book. But I do have two gripes: First, Nugent talks a lot about how nerds employ formal, rule-based speech. But to me, the real trademark of nerd speech is their obsession with breaking those rules, with exploiting the ambiguities in language. Nerds are obsessed with puns. I once went to a Mensa convention (research for a book, I swear), and the amount of wordplay was astonishing. An architect was said to have an "edifice complex." The eating of frogs' legs makes the frogs "hopping mad."

Second, and more substantially, I take issue with Nugent's dismissal of hipster nerds as just a bunch of posers who have co-opted nerdiness for their own sake. Many of these adult nerds are not faking it. They grew up receiving wedgies from the popular kids and obsessing over Philip K. Dick novels. Now, the information economy has made their peculiar skill set and obsessions valuable.

May the force be with the neo-Nerds, I say.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

That means I'm not writing a defense of nerds or a celebrationof nerds or a polemic against the nerd stereotype. There is a rationale, I think, for despising the young me. I empathize with nerds and antinerds alike.

what is a nerd?

As of this morning, Wikipedia states that "nerd, as a stereotypical or archetypal designation, refers to somebody who pursues intellectual interests at the expense of skills that are useful in a social setting such as communication, fashion, or physical fitness." That sounds about right, but it's wrong.

If an art critic arrives at your get-together in khakis and an undershirt, helps himself to six fingers of Jameson, tries to flirt with your teenage daughter, and then urinates with the bathroom door open, he's behaving like a socially awkward intellectual and exhibiting a pronounced disengagement with fashion and physical fitness. But "nerdy" doesn't feel like the best description of his behavior. The graphic designer you've recently met, who visits your apartment for the first time and talks for three hours about the suicidal impulses she's weathered since she dropped out of grad school, then describes your Klimt poster as sort of "freshman year of collegey," is also a socially awkward intellectual. But she isn't acting like a nerd. The problem with the current Wikipedia entry, in other words, is that nerdiness isn't really a matter of intellectualism andsocial awkwardness.

I believe there are two main categories of nerds: one type, disproportionately male, is intellectual in ways that strike people as machinelike, and socially awkward in ways that strike people as machinelike. These nerds are people who remind others, sometimes pleasantly, of machines.

They tend to remind people of machines by:

1. Being passionate about some technically sophisticated activity that doesn't revolve around emotional confrontation, physical confrontation, sex, food, or beauty (most activities that excite passion in non-nerds -- basketball, violin, sex, surfing, acting, knitting, interior decorating, wine tasting, etc. -- are built around one of these subjects).

2. Speaking in language unusually similar to written Standard English.

3. Seeking to avoid physical and emotional confrontation.

4. Favoring logic and rational communication over nonverbal, nonrational forms of communication or thoughts that don't involve reason.

5. Working with, playing with, and enjoying machines more than most people do.

Do I mean that nerds in this category are robots made of flesh and blood? No.

Brian Wilson is not into the ocean. "I'm afraid of the water," he says when people ask him about surfing. One interviewer has described his "Rain Man-like personality" as being reminiscent of a "voice-mail menu." Wilson is from Hawthorne, California, ten minutes from the Pacific, which makes his hydrophobia impressive. But his mother, Audree, has long maintained that he hummed the entire melody of "The Marines' Hymn" before he could talk, and that his mastery of musical instruments proceeded apace. When his younger brother Dennis persuaded him to write a song about a new teen pastime, he came up with "Surfin'," which became the Wilson brothers' first hit and led to their reinvention as the Beach Boys. Wilson proceeded to paint a fantasia in song, an amber-encased America ruled by athletes with multiple vehicles and multiple girlfriends. In the mid-1960s, as the rest of the Beach Boys toured Asia, he surrounded himself with studio musicians and recorded Pet Sounds, making Coke bottles into percussion instruments, recording in a pit of sand to get the right sound, writing string charts, and letting other people write his lyrics. The more the world fell for his make-believe, the more time he spent alone in his studio, sequestered from the world, living with equipment.

Wilson did things a machine cannot do. His work was more intuitive than logical. Nerds of this kind, crucially, are not actually like machines; they just remind people of them. They get stuck with the name "nerd" because their outward behavior can make them seem less than, and more than, human.

The second type of nerd probably consists equally of males and females. This is a nerd who is a nerd by sheer force of social exclusion.

In 1959, a twelve-year-old ninth grader named Anne Beatts moved from a small, cozy private school in Dutchess County, New York, to a public high school in Somers, then one of the more remote New York City commuter towns.

"That was when I first heard the expression 'nerd,'" says Beatts. "The joke definition of nerd was someone who farts in the bathtub and bursts the bubbles. But really it was a person considered by the popular kids to be uncool. A lot of things would make you a nerd, and they were basically being thought of as someone who worked, who did homework in study hall. Teenage acne was a qualification, appearance. I was wearing undershirts and everyone else was wearing training bras, at least."

Friendless, she tried to get her homework done at school instead of at home, so she would work during homeroom and lunch. The only other person who opted for that isolation was "a mathematical genius who muttered to himself." His name was Marshall.

"So somebody noticed this and they said, 'Do you like Marshall?' And I didn't know high-school vocabulary, and I didn't know the loadedness of the word like. I didn't want to go, 'No, I don't like him,' or 'I dislike him,' so I said, 'Sure.' And they went, 'Oh, she likes him. There goes Marshall's girlfriend.' And so this became an epithet and a cry of humiliation to me in my first year of high school, Marshall's Girlfriend. And so I'd been labeled as a nerd."

By the time grade-skipping had made her a fifteen-year-old senior in 1962, Beatts had become editor of the high-school newspaper, and by pursuing every activity that might engender acceptance, up to and including cooking hot dogs for the football game, she had attained a perch where she was no longer mocked as a matter of routine. She chose this time to publish an editorial in the paper called "Leave the Nerds Alone," which caused her to be suspended from her editorship for its controversial subject matter.

In the early 1970s she wrote for National Lampoon, and she landed at Saturday Night Live in 1975. There, she created the "Nerds" sketches with her sometimes writing partner Rosie Shuster, helping to bring the word nerd into mainstream usage, which will be discussed more thoroughly later. "Marshall Blechtman" became a character on the sitcom about nerds Beatts created, Square Pegs.

Anne Beatts is an example of the second kind of nerd. Beatts became a nerd not because she was like Marshall but because she got shoved into the same category as Marshall (a type-one nerd) by peers who were looking for somebody to exclude.

The heroes of American popular culture are surfers, cowboys, pioneers, gangsters, cheerleaders, and baseball players, people at home in the heat of physical exertion. But so many of the individuals who make these images are more like Anne Beatts. Their voyeurism -- their sense of staring from the wrong lunch table at a radiant nation -- makes for a vision of America that appeals to the whole world, including America itself. There's a globe full of outsiders thirsty for glimpses of the land of myth, and American nerds have gratified them with adoring images. Wilson -- the bodiless studio addict who spent days refining drum sounds for songs about high-school football and girls on the beach -- was the rule, not the exception, for North American fabulists, for DreamWorks as much as Microsoft. In this book, I'll try to catalog the way a largely nerdy chain of media figures has affected the way we think about nerds.

I'll also address the relationship between nerdiness and ethnicity. You don't need to belong to any particular class or ethnicity to be a nerd, but some ethnic stereotypes are nerdier than others. In the late nineteenth century, educators strove to nourish the "primitive" in white middle-class boys and thus mold them into athletic men of character, the opposite of the "greasy grinds" who studied their way out of the Lower East Side. In the 1980s, opinion columnists warned that the Japanese were taking over the world through their unrivaled love of machines and their mechanistically corporate cast of mind. If a propaganda artist of the Third Reich had time-traveled to 1984 and watched Revenge of the Nerds, he might have interpreted the hero, Louis Skolnick, as a traditional age-old caricature of a Jew, and Ogre and his band of overwhelmingly blond-haired and blueeyed jocks as the image of ideal Aryans (in appearance, if not conduct), even though the film never explicitly raises the question of ancestry or religion. The linguist Mary Bucholtz has observed that some contemporary high-school students who consider themselves nerds cleave so tightly to American Standard English, even as the popular whit...