Talk:geek

If OED has British dialectal geck as an antecedent, that's good enough for me. There are quite a few germanicisms that have survived in various dialects outside London (though naturally I can't think of any at the moment). Many of these have cognates in modern Dutch and/or German. In the absence of other clues, it's generally more likely that that both English and Dutch have retained an older form than that one has borrowed from the other. That seems to be the case here.

However, it still seems useful to point out the Dutch cognate. Modern Germanic languages often give clues to origins and meanings of English words. -dmh 15:44, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The sense "to look" sounds like a different word to me, cognate to Dutch kijken. PierreAbbat 11:10, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

another slang
Geek also means "to kill."

Verb forms
As with most other words used by the geek (sense 1) community, "geek" is frequently used as a verb - geeks have no qualms about verbing nouns for simplicity, even though many mainstream English scholars object to it. Should this be noted in the entry, or should it be left to the general assumption that nouns will be verbed and verbs will be nouned?

Some senses in which "geek" is a verb: [list] [*] to spend some time doing geeky things, usually writing/debugging software: "The requested features list is getting long, got time to geek tonight?" [*] an abbreviated form of geek out, especially sense 2 [*] to spend time with a computer (whether productive or unproductive) in preference to spending time with people: "I'm at Sue's party, but I'm geeking" - this sense also applies to geek out, and I've added it there [*] to use any unusual program or networking protocol - the implication is that the speaker does not understand what the other person is doing: "Are you geeking again?" (it has been noted that this is a much nicer thing to hear than "You're fired" when one is caught using a MUD on work time) [/list]

There are doubtless other senses, too, but this is a start.

Rosuav 05:38, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Origins of each sense
It seems to me that each English sense should have a date it first appeared in print. For example, the first few senses seem quite recent (late 20th century) while the sense of a carnival performer probably dates back a century or more. 71.66.97.228 06:28, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

asocial
Just to clarify my last edit (in the edit field I meant asocial): the article mentioned a geek is "usually asocial". As asocial can mean antisocial and antisocial can mean hostile/unfriendly (which is the first definition most Dutch readers would think of because of asociaal) I changed this to "often having limited or nonstandard social skills". Because a geek who LARPs is still being social, even if you think it's awkward. W3ird N3rd (talk) 13:35, 5 August 2017 (UTC)