an untranslatable word

I was just reading a couple of class essays on Oppenheimer, which said things like “in his youth, Oppenheimer was a nerd.” Although not quite false, this is somewhat off the mark in a way that I’ve often noticed. For in fact, the rather ugly American English word “nerd” strikes me as untranslatable, since it is dependent on social structures that exist almost nowhere else.

On the whole, my Egyptian students not only speak good English, but idiomatic English as well (it’s generally an American idiom gleaned from Hollywood, except for a handful who were educated at British schools in Egypt or the Persian Gulf). But they all misuse the word “nerd” in harmless fashion to mean “good student”. Anyone who gets all A’s at the American University in Cairo is called a nerd by their friends in laughing tones, and the target of the word always smiles back harmlessly. It is essentially a compliment here.

The continental Europeans I know use it somewhat more negatively and dismissively, but the negativity only goes so far as “what a boring person– all he does is study all the time, and he’s never any fun” (especially among those French and Italians who speak pretty good English, since most French and Italian intellectuals know how to have a good time and they tend to be offended and dismayed by other intellectuals who do not). Such Europeans always insist that there is a word for “nerd” in their own native languages, but whenever I press them on it, it never turns out to mean the same thing. The same is also true of an Israeli with whom I once discussed the word; she told me there was a Hebrew word for the same concept, but upon further questioning it was not the same thing at all. When they call someone a nerd, all they really mean is “What a killjoy! Why won’t he come out and have some fun with us?” It’s a term of frustration, not of exclusion.

I’ve only heard a few British people ever use the term, and they also sounded slightly off the mark in how they used it. Not sure about Canadians, but that would be an interesting control group.

In order to grasp what the word really means, you need an intimate familiarity with the unpleasant universe of American high schools, with their jock-and-cheerleader hiererarchies in which nerd does not just mean “good student” or even “very boring good student”, but functions as a term of both social exclusion and psycho-sexual revulsion. It is to the credit of all other nations that they never produced such a system or such a category, which will always remain untranslatable to outsiders.

But it makes me wonder how many other, far more important terms are misunderstood by outsiders in comical ways.

ADDENDUM: Indeed, Oppenheimer was a “nerd” in his youth in the very ugly American sense. But I could tell that that wasn’t what my Egyptian students meant. They merely meant that he was a good student, as the context made clear.