Last night our book club met.
The book under consideration was Flann O Brien’s, The Third Policeman, it turned out to be quite controversial.
Out of the seven of us (two men, five ladies) there were two fans
(the men), two who liked it and three who, even though admitting that it was worthy, found it impossible to read.

One of the dissenting ladies put her finger on the pulse when she stated that she thought “only a nerd” could enjoy it.
I immediately stood up and admitted it.
“I am a nerd!”

This morning I am not so sure.
In typical nerdlike fashion I got out my Oxford English Dictionary and looked up nerd.
Here is their definition;
“An insignificant or foolish person, a person who is boringly conventional or studious.”

Now I can live with the studious bit but the rest of it I think is a little unfair to nerds.
I have a bit of a passion for words, this has led to me acquiring quite a number of dictionaries (a quick glance and a rough tally reveals about thirty large ones on a shelf).

These do not rest unopened on the shelf, if they did I probably wouldn’t qualify as a nerd.
Every time there is the slightest discussion as to the meaning, usage, or even spelling of a word I dive to the dictionary shelf to fine out the truth.
Nerdish, but to my mind wholly admirable.

I am , I confess, a person who tends to be taken over by enthusiasms.
My saving grace, and that which may ultimately save me from the OED definition is that these enthusiasms are neither conventional or studious-but then I would say that wouldn’t I?

A nerd, as I have always thought it, was a person who was boring indeed but not necessarily foolish.
Surely we should be allowed degrees of nerdishness.
Mr. Collins, in Pride and Prejudice, was surely a big headed nerd and indeed a foolish one, but then his obsession was with the local big house and Lady Catherine de Bourg, hardly an uplifting cynosure.
Let us take instead a nerd of a different calibre, Stephen Maturin in the Aubery novels of Patrick O Brian, (and if you haven’t read these you should)
This is a man obsessed with natural history, this and the overthrow of Napoleon and the playing of the cello dominate his life.
But Stephen, as portrayed by O Brian, is never boring, in fact he is one of my favourite characters in literature of all time.
Perhaps he escapes true nerdishness by having more that one subject that dominates his life.
In that case I make a plea for myself.
Not only am I obsessed with words but also with antique glass, food and all things French, this being but the tip of the iceberg of my many interests.
I could therefore probably cast off the title of nerd without guilt but I don’t think I really want to.
What I do quarrel with is the OED definition.
Could we not define nerds as;
“Someone with an obsessive desire to discover all there is to be known about a subject”
Like Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, or Stephen Hawkins.
There is nothing foolish there is there.

I’m happy to admit I am a nerd in such company.