The Nerd Within

Nerd: /n3rd/noun - slang.

1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
(American Heritage Dictionary)

Word History: The word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (The nerd is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.)

Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a regular column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerd a square, any explanation needed?” ...

The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the United States in 1970 in Current Slang: “Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits.... An uninteresting person, a ‘dud.’”

Authorities disagree on whether the two nerdsDr. Seuss's small creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mailare the same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth EditionCopyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.)
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So, where does this leave me - where could I possibly be going with this? Yes, the 1950's/70's slang definition of Nerd still appears in dictionaries, but the more common understanding of Nerd is closer to the following definition: A person who is single-minded and accomplished in any intellectual pursuit. I have dropped socially inept largely because I see myself as a music nerd. And I of course do not consider myself socially inept - most of the time.

I recently came face to face with my nerdy-ness and learned the lesson that there is a time to embrace it and the time to trust it and let it go. Embrace it when translating languages, embrace it while doing a character study, embrace it while studying the history and style of a piece, love it in all of its glory while pouring over the music and all of the dynamic/stylistic markings left behind as clues as to its performance. But for the love of all that is holy in Opera, let it go when you perform.

There, I said it. Let it go. Allow the emotion to flow through trusting that the work has been done. The dynamics and language will come out; they have no other choice than to come through when performed with passion and understanding for what is being said...really said.

I have never felt this so strongly as when singing Nina's Aria from Pasatieri's The Seagull. In the opera, in order to survive, part of Nina lets go. She looses her human self and ascends to a plane where she believes she has become a homeless wanderer, a seagull. It took singing a 'mad' aria to pull me out of my intellect and into the emotional waters where opera becomes something truly powerful and dramatic.

The opera singer has so much to be aware of that it is easy for an intellectual mind to become obsessed with the minute details, thus loosing the beauty that each detail was intended to create. Perform in the moment, trusting that the details no longer have to be nourished, they are doing the nourishing.

Now, not only do I love nerds, but I also embrace the power of trusting in the nerd within.