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Seraphim Moonshadow

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Deifinition of a Geek

Tonight I heard that a geek is a clown who bites off live chicken heads. That made me wonder. Some people say it's someone with a pocket protector among other things, I'm sure.

   
         1. A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy.
         2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
   2. A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.

[Perhaps alteration of dialectal geck, fool, from Low German gek, from Middle Low German.]geeky adj.

    Our Living Language Our word geek is now chiefly associated with student and computer slang; one probably thinks first of a computer geek. In origin, however, it is one of the words American English borrowed from the vocabulary of the circus, which was a much more significant source of entertainment in the United States in the 19th and early 20th century than it is now. Large numbers of traveling circuses left a cultural legacy in various and sometimes unexpected ways. For example, Superman and other comic book superheroes owe much of their look to circus acrobats, who were similarly costumed in capes and tights. The circus sideshow is the source of the word geek, ?a performer who engaged in bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.? We also owe the word ballyhoo to the circus; its ultimate origin is unknown, but in the late 1800s it referred to a flamboyant free musical performance conducted outside a circus with the goal of luring customers to buy tickets to the inside shows. Other words and expressions with circus origins include bandwagon (coined by P.T. Barnum in 1855) and Siamese twin.

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Source: The American Heritage? Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright ? 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Main Entry:      gearhead1
Part of Speech:      noun
Definition:      a person who is extremely interested and knowledgeable about computers, electronics, technology, and gadgets; also called nerd, geek
Usage:      derogatory slang

Source: Webster's New Millennium? Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6)
Copyright ? 2003-2005 Lexico Publishing Group, LLC

geek

n 1: a carnival performer who does disgusting acts 2: a person with an unusual or odd personality [syn: eccentric, eccentric person, flake, oddball]

Source: WordNet ? 2.0, ? 2003 Princeton University

Agree? Disagree?

The circus sideshow is the source of the word geek, ?a performer who engaged in bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.?

THAT IS JUST WEIRD. I can imagine Gluttony doing that from FMA, and I'm sure barbaric people in the past have obviously done it but man...THAT'S JUST FREAKISH. I always imagine a geek as some guy witch thick glasses, a button up collar shirt with stripes or some type of stripe pattern with a mechanical pencil and paper with little squares on it designing some mecha. Or maybe some guy bent over a laptop hacking some government website and getting paid good bucks for it.

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firegem

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Re: Deifinition of a Geek

uh,         V!

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