Well, as many of you might have noticed, I'm a bitter asshole with hints of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that is my cue for getting deep into what a nerd is: it's a term that refers to an intelligent[sic] but single-minded person obsessed with a non-social hobby or pursuit (like comic book collecting, computer programming, playing RPGs). This, in turn, has pushed the nerd away from social acceptance. along with other types of different people without marked social skills by the more mainstream yuppies. When this happened, they were all equally referred to as geeks (a word that was used in the freakshows that denotes someone that will behead a live chicken with their mouth).
This word was used in the highschool hallways as a derogatory way to call someone a freak and an outcast, regardless of said person being a nerd, a booger-eater, someone with some kind of speech impediment, an over-sensitive chronic crier, a retard, someone that peed their pants... long-story short, it was a form to mock alienated people that the jock/bully types adopted to screw with you.
Then came the 21st. Century and the world's identity crisis with what I like to call "The Barney Generation" who adopted the hipster self-celebrating (which I have dissected before) culture as their own. These kids grew up thinking that a geek was the same as a nerd because, learning from the socially-driven side of the equation, they assumed that when they saw their big jock brother shoving some nerd into the lockers and calling him a geek, that's what it represented.
Self-proclaimed geeks today very rarely show the characteristics of the nerd types 
of people: They claim to like comics and such, but most of them don't read (let alone buy) comics, they mostly know the characters from the blockbuster films, plus, in a double-moral standard they tend to think comics are as ridiculous as Adam West's Batman portrayal, and that comic book fans are weird. They are not usually above your average computer user, they don't really seem to know any films that aren't mainstream (and if a movie is indie, it doesn't imply it's not mainstream), most of them are unfamiliar with what an RPG is, they are almost never science literate, their boutique nerd notions are very obviously taken from The Big Bang Theory show (whose characters I like to think of as boutique nerds), and when they claim they are a Star Wars geek, they know nothing other than having watched the films, and not even the names of characters in them like Bib Fortuna or Grand Moff Tarkin. It's ok to not know this, by all means, most yuppies are OK with it, I just think it's moronic to claim to be a nerd to fit in, in fact, the only thing they seem obsessed about is social acceptance, being precisely something nerds don't do
of people: They claim to like comics and such, but most of them don't read (let alone buy) comics, they mostly know the characters from the blockbuster films, plus, in a double-moral standard they tend to think comics are as ridiculous as Adam West's Batman portrayal, and that comic book fans are weird. They are not usually above your average computer user, they don't really seem to know any films that aren't mainstream (and if a movie is indie, it doesn't imply it's not mainstream), most of them are unfamiliar with what an RPG is, they are almost never science literate, their boutique nerd notions are very obviously taken from The Big Bang Theory show (whose characters I like to think of as boutique nerds), and when they claim they are a Star Wars geek, they know nothing other than having watched the films, and not even the names of characters in them like Bib Fortuna or Grand Moff Tarkin. It's ok to not know this, by all means, most yuppies are OK with it, I just think it's moronic to claim to be a nerd to fit in, in fact, the only thing they seem obsessed about is social acceptance, being precisely something nerds don't do
It still isn't cool to be a nerd, it's just cool to think you are one. Well, I'm sorry to say this, hipsters, but wearing glasses doesn't mean you are smart, having a Wonder Woman shirt doesn't imply you are a comic book savant (and much less if you don't even know what Themyscira is), everybody who listens to music knows who Led Zeppelin is (lets not pretend it's an underground band)... just get it through your head, if that obsessive-compulsive take on things is not there, you are not a nerd, because it actually takes a lot of effort and time (and money), it's not a matter of putting on glasses and a DC Comics shirt.
Finally, reading the Wikipedia entry of a comic book character is not the same as reading comics!!!
"People like us have built this culture on a century of oppression, and loneliness, and now it’s been cocted by a bunch of neo-nerd, hipster, douchebags for profit!"-Zero Charisma trailer-
