Geek out without fear

One of the things I abhor about U.S. culture is that, more often than not, a love of learning and knowledge is shunned — being an intellectual or bookish person often means being picked on in school and mocked and/or avoided in later life. We claim to appreciate intelligence, but our culture really tends to discourage those who would do too well at any particular endeavor.

When I was working in a car-seat factory in my early 20′s, I usually brought something to read for the coffee and lunch breaks — that was nearly 50 minutes a day of prime reading time I wasn’t about to pass up.

I still remember the co-worker who walked up to me, when I was still relatively new at the company and my bookish reputation not yet cemented, and asked “why are you reading?”

Not “what are you reading?”, which was a question I was used to asking of others myself, but “why are you reading?” She wasn’t the last person to suggest that spending my break time with a book was less socially acceptable than standing outside sucking a cigarette or swapping bar stories.

I got to thinking about this after stumbling on “Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive,” a discussion of the author’s embarrassment at having a love of learning obscure languages:

But occasionally we turn to ritual for another reason: because our favorite activities are just too embarrassing to do in public. My obsession, reading textbooks on foreign languages and memorizing obscure grammatical detail, is ritual of the latter persuasion. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I did it in public, I wouldn’t have any friends. But if I didn’t do it at all, then I couldn’t tell you that Ancient Greek had a noun declension for objects found in pairs. Like shoes, or maybe breasts. And what fun would I be, then?

…

The fact of the matter is that foreign-language primers and grammars are my version of a bodice-ripping pirate romance: a guilty pleasure I’d love to hide but can’t quite make go away. I relish conjugation tables and declension charts. I thrill to morphophonemics, glottochronology, perfectiveness.

How sad that someone with such an interesting hobby feels that it’s something best left undiscussed. I know I’d rather discuss Greek noun declensions at a social function than, say, American Idol.

It’s doubly sad that there are people who wouldn’t find this an endearing personality trait. Heinlein’s maxim (“specialization is for insects”) aside, the world needs people to dive into topics like language to help us better understand other cultures, and other people, and to make advances in technology. If Linus Torvalds wasn’t a geek, I’d probably be doing something very different today for a living, and probably not having quite so much fun.

In general, it’s a good thing that so many people are driven to hyperfocus on a particular area of study — either professionally or as a hobby — otherwise how would we make progress?

I think people should feel free to geek out without hesitation or embarrassment, whether they’re geeking on computers, science, books, or underwater basket weaving… the folks who have a consuming interest in learning about one or more topics are the folks who are fun to talk to. They’re the ones who have something to teach and something to discuss beyond the normal small-talk chit-chat that’s so boring.