Have been reading a few 70s NMEs and noticed that nerd was spelt nurd -was a popular word in their headlines around 1976. I’m just wondering why, presumably they stopped some time or other, well they usually get tired of thrashing a particular word. But yeah, I’ve never seen it spelt that way elsewhere, and it was several of the writers(though mainly Charles Shaar Murray), so not necessarily someone’s personal little idiosyncracy.
Maybe it was a cross between a nerd and a turd?
In “happy days”, joanie spelled “Drin” for Potsie to show she thought he was the opposite of a “nird”.
in german it’s nord (with an umlaut natch)
OK, so who says “nard”, it’s the only variation left?
They were called nyrds in Chaucer’s time
Have been reading a few 70s NMEs and noticed that nerd was spelt nurd
... I’m wondering whether they didn’t get spelling this from R. Crumb or Gilbert Shelton or one of those cats
this is interesting(well it is to me), had wondered if it was inspired by nigel molesworth’s gurls, but I guess not at all. Also, sorry to be a nurd, where did the word come from originally anyway?
They were called nyrds in
Roger McGuinn’s time
I thought this thread was about the Roches album.
I just checked, and as I thought, the title of that album was spelled with a “u” also. So I wonder when the standard spelling changed?
HOTTT
xpost, m grout:
ha ha, I’m glad somebody else remembers that scene...(still, I had remembered her spelling it “d-r-e-n”...I could be wrong)...
it was definitely “dren”: NEVER FORGET
who remembers the song that Potsie sereneded Joanie with?
Yeah, you’re right: “dren” it was! Not that I ever watched every episode of that crappy show back in the late ’70s, Tuesday nights at 8:00. Which means that I never mentally converted it into in my mind, since the first spelling I encountered was indeed “nurd” and was, yeah, around ’76.
Dunno why the n-e-r-d spelling ultimately won out. I do have an old issue of “Crawdaddy” lying around the apartment somewhere, and in a Bat Out Of Hell review, Ed Naha makes a few references to “nurd rock”. That’d probably be one of the last documented uses of the “U” spelling.