Good morning, beautiful people! Happy American Thanksgiving! I hope you’re having a good one, and that you’re safe and warm and enjoying the week. And on this day where, if you’re in the US, you stuff yourself with questionable food and perform rituals with bird consumption, let’s talk about The Past.
…Not… not that past. I do not have the energy to talk about that. Let’s talk about the early 1900s.
As I said a couple days back, I have been reading a lot old trade publications for the entertainment industry, which means carnivals and circuses and sideshows. You know what I didn’t find a lot of? Geeks biting the heads off animals. You know what nobody going to those shows found a lot of? Geeks biting the heads off animals.
“Hold up. What?”
If you’re confused by where I’m going with this: the conventional story, as expressed on for example Wikipedia, is that “geek” originally meant (quoting the 1975 American Heritage Dictionary, apparently) “a carnival performer whose act usually consists of biting the head off a live chicken or snake.”
I am not—today, at least—going to try and track down who originally made this up (although I have a fairly good idea). It was an explanation in the 1970s, obviously; see the dictionary. But if we look at a count of unique newspaper.com stories with the phrases “geek(s) bit(e/es/ing)” or describing them doing so, the graph looks like this:
| 1900s | |
| 1910s | |
| 1920s | |
| 1930s | |
| 1940s | |
| 1950s | |
| 1960s | |
| 1970s | |
| 1980s | |
| 1990s | |
| 2000s |
One thing I’ve done here is to cull any duplicates, which masks that a huge chunk of these examples are from a couple of news stories that were widely syndicated in the 80s (this is why I said I have a fairly good idea where the urban legend came from)—if I ignored those, the graph would be even more dramatic. It also somewhat ignores that nearly all of them (including the widely syndicated ones) are reviewing a movie or book.
There’s a separate question of whether “biting the heads off things” was ever a very common activity, let alone at sideshows. I don’t know. It shows up sometimes, but it’s always written about scandalously and in almost no cases is the person doing so referred to as a “geek.” So there is that angle, as well—writers discussing the act did not see fit to reach for that word.
Sort of like with all the Balto stuff, it serves to take a step back and ask: what, exactly, am I hinting is “untrue” or “misunderstood”? Am I saying that “geek” doesn’t mean “someone who bites the heads off a live chicken or snake”? Well… yes, sort of. Am I saying it was never used that way? No, for reasons we will get into.
But, we can assert:
- There has never been a point at which, if you called someone a “geek,” they would think you were talking about a carnie, and also
- There has probably never been a point where, if you used the word “geek” with a carnie, they would assume they needed to hide their chickens.
I’ll add a point 3 later. Anyway, alongside “Balto is a lie,” I want to chart a careful course here. Think of it like if I told you “as everyone knows, ‘spooky’ was originally a term used by American GIs to refer to a gunship providing air support.” It is literally true that the word was sometimes used to refer to AC-47s flying support missions in Vietnam. But that was never the most common usage, it’s not the source of the word, and even amongst American soldiers it is not necessarily what the word means.
So what, uh… what is a “geek”?
That’s a little tough to pin down, because it’s sort of fluid. In general, “geek” has always been a mildly derisive term for someone you don’t think very much of. If there is a skew to it, it’s that a “geek” is specifically low-class or uncultured, someone who might plausibly be considered “beneath” you. Here’s the Omaha Evening World-Herald, in January 1914:
Four thousand persons watched a squash tournament down in Gotham yonder evening, while here in Omaha twice as many guys as that stood before a drugstore window and watched a geek stropping a new fangled razor.
(An article in the 1927 Wichita Falls Herald is headlined: “Let’s all get eddicated, and then see how we stack up inside with some geek who’s let decency soak in on him.”) But a geek might also be someone who isn’t a yokel but is someone you think is conspicuously stupid, such as in issue of the 1912 Machinist’s Monthly Journal:
This article in question comes from some geek in Irvington, Ind., wherever that is […] he makes a great squeal about wages being increased 20 per cent and lodge dues and assessments 275 per cent. I think he is lame in the head.
Or this op-ed lamenting unserious boxing and wrestling, from a Los Angeles paper in 1955—a usage that would not make sense if the writer thought that geeks were conspicuously grotesque or violent:
More and more of this dizzy stuff keeps getting into California rings, guys wearing derby hats and other silly doings which cover up a lack of pugilistic ability… some geeks think this is “color.” The only clown who’s funny is the one in the circus.
A geek might be simply undesirable, like this story from the Tacoma, Washington News-Tribune that same year:
Young man dispatched a telegraphic message to his sweetheart saying “I love you forever.” The operator made it read, “I leave you forever.” The girl thought she had been jilted and married another, and the young man in the case is suing the telegraph company for damages. Hope the gentle reader will not think it an unreasonable view when it is asserted that any geek who would send such a telegram deserved to lose out.
Or this one, from the Buffalo News in 1941—another example that wouldn’t make sense if anyone thought “geeks” were carnival performers, let alone ones regularly chomping down on small animals.
EVEN THE HOMELIEST girl can snare a husband and live unhappily with him forever after. Chicago psychologist says all she has to do is gain moral dominance over some geek and then apply moral pressure.
Perhaps they might be someone who behaves obnoxiously, like this complaint from Corvallis in 1916:
ONE THING THE MATTER WITH THE PICTURE SHOW: The geek who sits behind you and reads the writing on the screen out loud.
Or this description from the October 22nd 1920, Humphrey, Nebraska Democrat:
A conscientious objector is one of those mushy geeks who would want to warm the water before drowning the kittens in it.
Or here’s a story in the 1919 Granite Monthly, describing someone’s decision to become a soldier:
He answered the beck and call of this sergeant, that second louie, a man, just like him, but a man with something on his sleeve or his shoulder and so his superior. He let some “geek” blowing a horn get him out of his blankets. He sailed worse than steerage…
It doesn’t always mean specifically “uncultured” or even unpleasant in a definable way. A story in the Arizona Republic in August, 1927 describes someone as a “Packard geek […] showing a complete line of Packard models—nineteen of them in his showroom.” The 1914 short story “In Love” includes the line: “Anyhow, her old man has a grouch on me, because he can see how things are between her and me, and he wants his girl to marry some geek with a wad of bank fruit.” A letter to the editor in 1940 describes being impersonated by “some queer geek with a red nose and long beard.”
In carnival parlance, “geeks” were not anything in particular, except that they were generally déclassé. A show that wanted to attract a better class of customer might say (as Krause Greater Shows did) that “girl shows and ‘geeks’ are absolutely tabooed.” They might charm snakes, as a “Prof LaRouge” did in Illinois in 1917. They might eat raw food. They probably did occasionally do things like murder chickens (although I can’t find any direct evidence of this—I'm sure it exists) because, as the Philadelphia Inquirer put it in 1938:
In carnival parlance, “Geek” means “Wild Man”
And it may be this sense, perhaps, that also made it a common term for Princeton footballers in the late teens and 20s. There, I’m not quite sure. Usage of the word “geek” with reference to carnival shows is complicated because, while there are mentions of geeks biting the heads off things in the 1940s, 1. they’re not talking about carnivals themselves, they’re talking about depictions of carnivals in movies and 2. someone who bites the head off a chicken might be a “geek” in the pejorative sense, like they’d be a “monster” or a “brute,” but that doesn’t mean the writer understood that as the definition of the word.
Anyway, closing the loop:
Today, “geek” is often still slightly pejorative, but it has a fairly straightforward meaning—like I am a history geek, say, and we all know what that means. I do not think that it is clear where this sense of the word came from. The OED quotes Jack Kerouac in 1957 as saying a college wanted him to answer “big geek questions”; a 1980 citation defines it as “Geek, studious person.” There are several paths by which this might have occurred.
One, it might have been associated with people who were unsociable and weird, which was one angle of its its most common usage, and it so happened that what was considered “outré” happened to involve computers or dragons or Star Trek at the time that one or two examples of mass media could cement that as the stereotype instead of football. Two, it might’ve have been an ironic inversion of the other angle of its most common usage, which is someone stupid or uneducated.
That said, “geek” is a short nonsense-word, too, and it’s also possible that its usage for football fans and D&D players alike is independently derived, like the similarly ambiguous “nerd” or “dork” or “dweeb.” This was the point 3 I mentioned earlier, which is:
- “Geeks” have never principally been carnival performers
- Carnie “Geeks” have never definitionally eaten live animals
- Today’s “Geek” is probably not related in any sense to the carnie one
The more you know!
Now go eat some turkey, ya frickin' geeks :3
