Geeks Chic

One day when I had nothing to do (well, actually, I had a lot to do, but I didn’t want to do any of it), I decided to play the Google game. This is the one where you input your own name or something else into the field in quotes to see how many search results you get. I decided to search the term “geek.” What I found astounded me.

So, I figured that most every term would fetch that many results, or close to it. I started with what I would assume is the antithesis of ‘geek’: the “gossip girl’, which yielded 270 M. ‘Beauty Queen” yielded 650M.

So what does this mean? Is Google a valid measurement of popular culture? I suppose it’s not extremely scientific, but it does seem to be in indication of how many sites mention the word, which, by the way, originated as a circus term for a person who bit the heads off live animals. Thankfully, that particular aspect of geekdom seems to have faded out, unless you count Ozzy Osbourne in his former glory days.

As early as 2001, the term “geek chic” began to be used, and in fact, a London clothing company ran a campaign using that very term to market its clothing. USA Today even noted that “Knowledge is power and geek is chic. If you’re a cyber whiz who is plugged into the pop-culture world of sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, and cult horror, maybe even the master of a Web shrine devoted to such once-arcane matters, you don’t just rule. You rock.”

In my own novels, Queen Geek Social Club and Queen Geeks in Love, the self-professed geeks of the title are girls who unapologetically being themselves. They like science and science fiction, but they also like fashion and guys. They want to change the world, but they also want to enjoy it. I like to think of them as the geek I never was in high school confident, comfortable, clever. They know who they are, and although they struggle with self-doubt and anxiety-like all teenagers, they use their intelligence and the support of their geek sisters to get through it all. In the end, it’s a great message to send to girls (or guys), and it reminds me of something someone once wrote in the margin of my yearbook: “be the way you are and you’ll go far.” Go, geeks.