Thank you, Philip Kelly of Ottawa, who I can only assume is either a reader of this blog or one of the 17 people who regularly tuned in to watch me on CBC's Project X. The recent publication of your letter to Esquire magazine's editors nominating me for the title "semifamous, sexy, supersmart babe" (and the editors' subsequent decision to award me said title, given that no other nominations for this possibly fictional category were received) has brought much pride to this household.  It is proof that a Young Nerd can overcome buck teeth and a terrible habit of eschewing hair-brushing in favour of book-reading to see the day when a tiny photo of her head occupies 2 square centimetres of men's magazine real estate, in the section after the masthead and before the real magazine that people tend to read while using the bathroom. Next stop, an inch-high body shot hidden behind a subscription card in Maxim.

This is not my first foray into the realm of sexy geekdom.  Indeed, readers of Wired.com might have noticed my presence on their Sexiest Geeks 2008 poll. If, that is, they scrolled very, very far down. When I was first made aware of my presence on the list, I was occupying something like 361st position. I seem to have worked my way up to around 120th since then, but I am still well behind Richard Stallman, Subcomandante Marcos, and a dude that built himself a robot girlfriend.

I am bemused by the honours, if only for the fact that it means my 8th grade decision to begin brushing my hair on a more regular basis eventually paid off.  Inclusion into the ranks of hot nerddom, however, does raise a point that I think merits discussion - is the "sexy geek" label a help or a hindrance?

In my eyes - my big, brown soulful eyes, rimmed with dewy lashes and batting coquettishly in your general direction, Dear Reader  (I jest. I just had a cat hair stuck in my eye) - it depends.

Take the women that placed 2nd and 4th in the official Wired.com 2008 contest - Marina Orlova and Jade Raymond. Orlova is an attractive Russian-born philologist (sorry Philip Kelly and other Pips, this does not mean she studies Phils - her interest is in historical linguistics) who sports two degrees and two perfectly-formed breasts, which are accented with lingerie and displayed to great prominence on her website, hotforwords.com. Raymond is a stunning Canadian computer programmer and occasional television host best known for her role as lead producer of one of the most popular video game titles of recent years, and has yet to appear online in anything less modest than a tank top and cardigan.

Popular opinion would hold that the bustier-clad videoblogging vixen who releases daily videos of her lolling about on her bed, purring words like codswallop and pecksniffian, would be the one whose reputation would suffer (the validity of this assumption is a debate in and of itself, of course). Instead, it's been the polished, polite and professional producer whose good looks have led to controversy.

While Orlova's dedicated efforts at self-promotion have parlayed sexy wordsmithery into a cottage industry and built an internet-wide legion of admirers, Raymond's mere existence has sparked a wave of backlash. Her detractors - let me rephrase that, her pecksniffian detractors -  have long claimed she's nothing more than a pretty face who has very little input into the games she produces (this, of course, is sheer codswallop), and in 2007 this culminated with Raymond as the subject of a vile, offensive and graphic comic that was widely circulated around the web.

Teasing apart the myriad reasons why the internet has reacted so differently to these two strong, intelligent, and beautiful women is a PhD thesis unto itself. Does it have to do with how much "sex" you inject into "sexy"? Is it a matter of self-promotion? Or is it the simple fact that philology fans are a much more affable crowd than gamers ? I don't know.  

What I do know is that this sexy geek is taking the Jade Raymond route and sticking to modest clothing. I'm supremely ill-suited for sex kitten nerditude. The only cleavage I have is enzymatic in nature, gartered stockings look more like fishing waders on me, and after all of these years, I'm still not all that great with the hairbrush.

In last week's post-blog dialogue, reader Shane mentioned his difficulty in pinpointing the essence of "nerd" and asked for my definition of the word. It turned out to be a much simpler exercise than I had originally thought, for in the singularly reflexive moment that followed, I realized that one could define a nerd as someone who gleefully obliges when asked to define something.

Indeed when the intellectual gauntlet is thrown down, it's the nerd amongst us who will rise, or, more accurately, hyperactively scramble, to the occasion. We are incapable of resisting a mental challenge, whether it's a simple matter of seeking out a definition or solving a puzzle, or something more involved, like calculating whether or not it's possible to have a non-overnight transpacific commercial airline flight whose entire journey takes place in daylight hours* or building a trebuchet to see how far you can fling a car.**

This compulsive need to exercise one's mental faculties stems from the nerd's defining characteristic, namely an unabashed curiosity - the insatiable and lifelong desire to learn about anything and everything. In fact,  I suspect that many of us nerds have shared the same existential crisis, which arises not from the sudden grasp of our own mortality, but rather from the resulting realization that we haven't got time enough to read every book in the library.

Regardless, we soldier on and try to cram as much learning into the day as possible. We're the people that read each and every panel at the museum (and sometimes correct them). We bought iPhones because it means we're never more than five seconds away from being able to check something on Wikipedia.  We've vetoed potential partners who we felt were not sufficiently excited at the prospect of going to the science centre on a first date.  And we're the people you don't ever, ever want to play Trivial Pursuit with.

No column on the definition of "nerd" would be complete without a few brief words on the notion of the "geek" and the "dork". A nerd is not always a geek, but a geek is always a nerd. Neither geeks nor nerds are necessarily dorks, but dorks do occur at a greater frequency within the nerd-geek subpopulation. Follow me?

A geek is someone who exhibits the archetypal nerd trait of compulsively pursuing new information; however, whereas the pure nerd is a knowledge generalist, equally fascinated by dinosaurs, art history and teaching themselves Cantonese, a pure geek tends to focus their dogged learning on a single subject area. These subjects are often scientific and/or technical in nature, and include things like computer programming, backyard engineering, and writing songs about Kirk and Spock.

A dork is someone with markedly impaired social skills - the person that regularly stumbles, mumbles and fumbles through even the simplest task. Napoleon Dynamite writ large. There is almost certainly a higher proportion of dorks within the nerd ranks than one would observe in the population at large, and I suspect the majority of these cases come about as a result of the young nerd focusing on their intellectual betterment to such a degree that they completely fail to take notice of the world around them.

Many of us spent a good portion of our childhoods entirely unaware of the codes and behaviours that ruled the school playground - we were too busy organizing our dinosaur sticker collection by taxa to care about which lunchbox was in fashion this year, which bit of playground equipment was the place to be seen at, or whether Velcro shoes were a clear tip-off that their wearer was a loser. By high school, the nerd's keen powers of observation had kicked in and heretofore unknown subtleties of social interaction came to light. We dipped our toes into the sea of adolescent relationships and eventually figured out how to swim. The dorks, on the other hand, tripped over a piece of driftwood on their way to the sea and landed face-down in the sand. They're the ones who never figured out the rules for getting along in life, from the basics (like rule 2476 from The Nerd's Guide to Successful Social Interaction: Just because you want to correct someone's grammar doesn't mean that you should), to the more complex (see rule 83756: Taxidermy and first dates rarely mix).

If you're curious as to your place on the Nerd-Geek-Dork continuum, OKCupid.com has a test that will reveal your nerd/geek/dork score (sample question: "Throughout this test, have you been trying to figure out which each question is testing for?").  I'm 91% pure nerd, and just may adopt that as the slogan for this blog.

*It's not.

**Far.