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Geeks, everywhere

When I saw a guy on the bus today wearing the green and gold and reading The Golden Wallabies, two words popped into my head: rugby geek.

Amazing that a term once reserved for the lowest rung of the social ladder, a hater’s word, has had its teeth pulled like this; I guess it was about the same time the real geeks started taking over the planet. Now everyone’s a geek of some strain, and the OED has a special mention for the new usage:

a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest : a computer geek.

If you have a special enthusiasm for a subject, something that isn’t shared by everyone else, or one that goes to extremes others dare not (everyone loves music, but is everyone a music geek?), you get tagged. If you don’t have an interest worth being tagged for, what kind of sad, uninteresting motherfucker are you? Go get a hobby.