dispatches from TJICistan

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazi…

What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years. She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd… Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite”

I wonder how much in government grants and public university salaries we, the taxpayers, have spent to learn this valuable, valuable piece of opinion ?

In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white”…

I’m glad the words “hegemony” and “hegemonic” exist – they serve as a signaling device that the speaker has been well-steeped in academic Marxist nonsense, and everything they say can henceforth be totally ignored by adults.

Nerds are not simply victims of the prevailing social codes about what’s appropriate and what’s cool; they actively shape their own identities and put those codes in question.

I could write a 20 line Lisp program that would churn this crap out.

Though Bucholtz uses the term “hyperwhite” to describe nerd language in particular, she claims that the “symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness” can be used elsewhere.

Fascinating.

In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.”

Go on…

the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.”

Uh huh…

If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids … it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

Wow.

Nerds do not make up a majority of the population. That is deep.

I can see why she’s been studying this for 12 years – there’s just so much to learn.

Idiot. (By the way, check out how we the taxpayers have been paying for this).

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