"You want to know where geeks come from. Well listen -- you don't find 'em. You make 'em."

--William Lindsay Gresham

So, what's a geek?  Everybody knows that, right?  The guy who taught us math and never took a bath (thank you , Tom Lehrer). The girl nobody talked to. The little redhead who collected bugs. Or maybe it's one of the smart kids who turned the term around and claimed it proudly, just like the hippies dubbed themselves freaks a generation earlier. Or maybe he's the only guy who can still program the mainframe, a card counter in Vegas, or the girl who was just elected President…

 Geek's a word on the move, evolving through the language, but what did it mean first?

It might be from an old word Geck, that dates from at least the 1500s. Shakespeare uses "geeke," but after Bill, Geek is, at best, a rare term.

"Geek" apparently entered the language of mainstream American English in 1946, with the publication of a remarkable novel by a writer named William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley.

Nightmare Alley is a noir masterpiece, the story of a carnival grifter whose fate is tied to mankind's desire to believe in miracles. The novel is told in chapters that are named for the major arcana of the Tarot, The Fool, The Magician, and onward to the inevitable Hanged Man. Cleverly structured and told in dark, tight prose, Gresham's book is one of the great volumes of lurid fiction that make up the true literature of the 20^th Century.  It is also one of the best artistic renditions of life in the twilight of the American carnival. I'm not even sure if the book is still in print, except as a  Graphic Novel illustrated by underground legend Spain Rodriguez, but old paperbacks like the one below are easy enough to find.

The novel sold well enough but  the word really infected the collective language lobe  when the film version of Nightmare Alley was released in 1947. A mostly faithful adaptation of the book (lacking the literary touch of the Tarot theme and a believable ending), the film starred Tyrone Power, who bought the novel's film rights and championed the story as a starring vehicle for himself. Wisely, I suppose, because it's probably his best performance. Anyone who sees the film will carry the vision of the Geek with them long after the memory of the rest of the story has dimmed. So what was a geek?  In carny terms, a geek was a wildman, a "performer" who enacted crazy stunts, tearing his hair, foaming at the mouth, eating raw meat or even live animals. In Nightmare Alley, the Geek specializes in biting the heads off live chickens. In the 70s, the term "chicken-eating geek," reflected this more refined understanding of the term's specific meaning. The Geek was a symbol of the lowest depths of the human condition and of the cruelty of the crowd.

Funny how the meaning has changed, eh?  Geek has an elite status in its most common usage now, an ultimate technician, a high priest of pop culture; in the words of one Urban Dictionary definer, "The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.

"Embrace Geek power! You have nothing to lose but your chickens.