Not "the Nerd Man," he cautions: Nerdman, with the stress on the first syllable -- like "Truman," as in the Jim Carrey film.
Between the belt-along hooks on songs like "Hip Hop Hooray," "Jamboree," and "Feel Me Flow," the writers indulged in their intricate thousand-piece syllabic puzzles: "Serve words with nerve, embedded, I said it / word, damn, you nerd, man, you heard".
For those averse to technical terminology, "iWoz" can feel like a day pass to Nerd World: "Man, I sniveled at Basic back then.
The point is: Wise, deserving nerd men love smart women, not only because they can effortlessly profit from women's intellectual labor but also because they can have sex with them.
Cline's philosophy, to be clear, is: Nerd men are unloved mensches who simply must be given porn with more "Battlestar Galactica" references; other people are Bad and maybe not even human.
A more conventional account of the intersection of a single life and time than Andress's book, "Fatal Purity" is in its way just as rewarding, because of what Robespierre represents: the ascent of the mass-murdering nerd — a man who, having read a book, resolves to kill all the people who don't like it as much as he does.
Montreal native Lateef Martin is a bit of a nerd renaissance man.
Its five interviewees are chatty (most are men, unsurprising given the film-nerd world), whose voice-overs accompany a stream of visuals.
So it seems, initially, that Gus is just another ostensibly nice nerd-king man-child of the Apatow universe, who, by dint of a little effusiveness and a lot of just being there, manages to seduce or, at least, capture the women around him, who happen to be better-looking and more interesting than he is.
But you can feel these metaphors of heat slipping over the hill toward the Graveyard of Dated Slang, where rests co-ed, crazy, man!, nerd and you're history.
Mr. Updike fails to make Owen's metamorphosis from nerd to ladies' man remotely credible, and his account of Owen's philandering has all the spontaneity and immediacy of a paint-by-numbers kit.
