Dr. Seuss Did What?

dr. seussNERD (n. Slang)
1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

I stumbled across a posting on Twitter from the Dictionary.com site, offering up neologisms (new words) whose origins surprised me.

Here’s one that Dr. Seuss apparently created a while ago, even if the definition has changed over time:

“The slang term nerd means an intelligent but single-minded person, obsessed with a certain hobby or pursuit, e.g. a computer nerd. But the word that has been the bane of so many elementary schoolers’ existence was actually invented by their king: none other than Dr. Seuss himself! The word first appeared in print in Seuss’s 1950 picture book, If I Ran the Zoo, though Seuss’s ‘nerd’ is a small animal from the land of Ka-Troo, not a pale kid with glasses taped together.”

For more of these fun words, click below:
http://dictionary.reference.com/slideshows/novel-neologisms#nerd

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