I've noticed of late that all kinds of people are eagerly seizing on the label of "geek." Oh, maybe you termed these folks "wusses," "nerds," or more recently "otaku," but by and large it's become a good thing to be a geek.
Means you're smart, quirky, and interesting. In the club.
Oh rly?
Ish doan thank so.
You aren't a geek unless you were beaten, regularly and with great malice, by the Beautiful People and Jocks.
You aren't a geek unless you spent every spare moment in the school library. By the time you were 12 or so, you'd digested all the Asterix and Obelix comics, the Spirits, Herge's Adventures of Tintin, Malleus Maleficarum, all HPL, all Heinlein, and you'd have some special area of focus, whether coding, electronics, foreign language, or preferably all of them.
You knew this by heart:
And there's a whole lot more. What I'm getting at, please understand, is that there isn't a litmus test for the appellation, but that it's a lot more - a helluva lot more - than just slapping on a pair of Tina Fey square specs and saying, "I'm a geek!"
Many of us have deep interests - sports, barbecue, vehicles, Jersey Shore, mysteries, alt medicine, gardening, stained glass, funny voices, love of cats, you name your fascination. But just liking something a whole bunch doesn't make you a geek.
A geek will know what Cowboy Be-Bop is, but will never have attended a school prom or any scholastic sporting event. These are givens.
Geek stripes are earned by being actively punished by the status quo. Exclusion is the price of admission. No geek will ever self-label as such. Rather, the label applies only to those who qualify by elimination.
The otaku is an even more rarefied animal. Unlike the geek's highly selective knowledge base, the otaku's dataset will be encyclopedic on a given subject.
An aficionado is not a geek. Geeks earn their identity only through long suffering.