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Help me drive my boyfriend insane.

One day, after we'd been dating a few weeks, "Rupert" and I were discussing the hell that is working full-time and going to school simultaneously. (He's two-thirds of the way through a killer MBA program and spends about 30 hours a week on that, on top of his engineer job.) Those of you that used to read the first incarnation of my blog about five years ago will remember my misery while I was finishing my bachelor's degree and working too much. GOD, IT SUCKED.

Anyway, so I said to Rupert, "You know how I got through it? Eye of the tiger, baby. Eye. Of. The. Tiger."

I have never seen such a look of stark horror on a man's face. He stared at me, frozen in shock that I would say something so fantastically cheesy. He was literally rendered speechless for a full 20 seconds or so, thinking what have I done, falling in love with such a DORK?

Finally, he shook his head in disbelief. "Did you actually just say that?"

"Yes, yes I did. And now I will sing it." And I sang it. Risin' up, back on the street, did my time, took my cha-ances. Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet, just a man and his will to survive! And so on. I'm pretty sure Rupert decided to break up with me for a few moments there. But then I giggled and sat on his lap and promised to never commit such an offense of lameness again. He forgave and we moved on.

But I lied. I can't stop saying it now, every chance I get. I like to hear his groan of disappointment and angst.

So here's what I want from you. Do you know a foreign language? If so, I beg of you, tell me how to say "eye of the tiger" in that language. I'm pretty sure in Spanish it's "el ojo del tigre" but if that's wrong, correct me please. I'd like to have it in French, German, and whatever other crazy foreign tongues any of you might have in your awesome brains. Then, I can psychologically abuse Rupert multiculturally. Gracias, mis amigos!

UPDATE, six hours later: You people are blowing my mind; Rupert is not even going to know how to deal with me anymore. Behold the power of the blog! So far, we have:

French
Japanese
German
Italian
Ukrainian
Arabic
Latin
Danish
Russian
Hawaiian
Greek
Esperanto
Dutch
Welsh
Chinese
Portuguese
American Sign Language

Not to mention Klingon, pig Latin, Swedish chef, Marklar, and Mooj ("Durka durka, mohammed jihad...tiger.").

More? Are there more? I'm like a crackhead for this now. Do I have a ton of bilingual readers or do you guys have some super-awesome translator websites that I don't know about? Either way, doesn't matter, I'm in love with all y'all. (Yeah, I just said "all y'all". I own it.)

UPDATE, 24 hours later: Oh my god. Now we have it in:

Hungarian
Latvian (via email)
Hindi and Urdu

As well as (you guys are cracking me UP):

Elvish
Morse code
Huttese, as in Jabba
Double-talk
Jibivibiribish
Dagboaen
Canadian
NY/NJ
Nautical flags
Semaphore flags (very cool by the way)
Mime
Whale
JavaScript

BEST. COMMENT. SECTION. EVER.

P.S. Rupert came over last night and informed me that I, along with all of you, are totally NUTS. Just kidding. He mostly just shook his head and stared at me in pain and confusion. Just kidding again. He actually thinks it's funny and quite amazing, which it unequivocally is. Consider my world totally rocked. I want to have all of your babies (sounds painful; maybe not).

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Comments (130)

:

In French it's "L'oeil du tigre" (pronounced loy doo teegreh). Go get him.

:

In Japanese it's 'tora no hitomi.'

Hope that helps.

:

Sorry, no translation from me, but what was wrong with that in the first place? I thought it was an interesting and mildly humorous statement.

Of course, my brain may be off this morning, having just watched (finally) Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" for the first time last night.

Birdman :

In German, it's "Das Auge des Tigers, Baby. Das.Auge.des.Tigers."

:


Auge des Tigers

(that'd be German, yo!)

:

Damn! Foiled! (and I forgot to say Das) Fooey!

Birdman :

Starvin' Marvin says, "Click click derk, Baby"

:

Nihongo ga wakarimaska, Rupert?

In Romaji (phonetic Japanese) that says "Do you understand Japanese?" "Eye of The Tiger" *roughly* translates as ...

Hitomi no Tora

jbc315 :

In Italian,

"L'occhio della tigre"

:

Kacie and I are on the same page, but I wonder which of ours says "Tiger's Eye" and which says "Eye of the Tiger"?

Otto Gass :

In Ukrainian, oko tihra. Or, tihroho oko.

:

In mooj talk its:

Durka durka, mohammed jihad...tiger

But you have to blow yourself up after saying that in order to get the right effect.

deathbyscience :

In arabic it is roughly

at-Tarf al-nimr.

:

In Latin I think it's oculus tigris, or maybe oculus tigridis (dang those declensions!) but I'm checking on that with my friend the Latin professor. Use either one, Rupert's not going to be correcting your Latin grammer anytime soon, is he?

OH! MY! GOD! Is it physically possible for people to rule more than you guys?

So I have it in French, German, Spanish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and mooj (k2aggie07 you made me laugh out loud). So far! More more more please, if possible, thank you!

Poor Rupert.

Patrick :

By definition, if he's your boyfriend, he's already insane, mkay?

:

Don't forget Pig Latin:

Eye-ay of-ay e-thay Iger-tay.

:

Starvin' Marvin says, "Click click derk, Baby"

Also, in the Marklar language, "Eye of the Tiger" would translate roughly, "Marklar of the Marklar."

:

Danish: "Tigerens øje" (Hard to explain how to properly pronounce it, but "tee-yohns oy-eh" ought to do the trick).

Russian: "Glaz tigra." ("a" isn't "flat", it's open as in British-English "are", and "i" is pronounced "ee" as in "eek")

Everybody else has already covered any other language I might be passingly familiar with.

Sloan :

My son says this all the time. For example, right before one of our martial arts demonstrations: "Go get 'em, Daddy! Eye of the Tiger!" Delightfully cheesy.

I'd love to be able to tell you what it is in Irish, Rachel, but I don't know enough of it to say.

:

And Hawaiian:

Maka o ka Kika is "eye of the tiger," though I like "eye of the big cat" better:

Maka o ka nui popoki

Sparrow :

And phonetically in Greek (I have a lot of bi-lingual friends!):

MAH-ti tou TEE-ghri

Rupert :

You're a total retaad... :-P

Love you, Baby.

:

Klingon- mIn vo' targ ghu

There is actually no Klingon word for "tiger" so I substituted "targ" which is a large fearsome Klingon beast and oh lord I don't think I'm gonna get laid anytime soon. :o)

Pat Berry :

Since you mention the previous incarnation of your blog, Rachel . . . are you still planning to add those posts to your archives?

UltraWineSaver :

Ho-rlang-e-eh nun. (that's korean for literally, "the tiger's eye". 호랑이의 눈.

Pat Berry :

In , it's "okulo de la tigro".

:

In Dutch:

Het oog van de tijger

Alexander :

When you run out of languages, you can work hard and try to perfect Derek Zoolander's patented look.

Useful for many instances where speech isn't possible but you still want to convey the meaning.

:

God only knows how any of these are pronounced, but here goes:

Welsh (I think this is right):

llygada chan 'r ddywalgi

I really hope these next three come out right:

Chinese:

老虎的眼睛

Greek:

μάτι της τίγρης

Arabic:

عين من النمر

Pat Berry :

In speech, it's "eye-a ooff zee teeger".

Alexander :

I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that Welsh, Irish and Gaelic are all the same language?

I swear, I've never seen so many double consonants and seemingly random placement of spaces in any language.

I love the sound of it spoken, but when it comes to phonetics, I'd have better luck pronouncing a hieroglyph than a Gaelic word.

Birdman :

Don't forget sign language: [of the]

retrocop :

How about Portuguese: "olho do tigre" or did somebody already do that one?

retrocop :

I know Russian has been done phonetically but it's spelled "глаз тигра" in Cyrillic.

retrocop :

I know Russian has been done phonetically but it's spelled "глаз тигра" in Cyrillic.

retrocop :

Darn it, double post!

:

Oh GFresh....never give up hope. :) Yours made me laugh out loud and make my dogs look at me funny.

:

How about video?

The original:

The Starbucks ad (24 years later):

You could also do other things to sneak it in. For example, leave a golf magazine open to a picture of Tiger Woods, and comment on his eyes.

This could be like those old ads that you thought were for one product or service, but ended, "...but I saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico."

Berge45 :

I can't just just sit by and read anymore. You people are amazing. The sign language put me over the top. I can just picture Rachel signing "eye of the tiger" across the room to Rupert.

Holy mother of the sun!! I did not expect this AT ALL. Like Berge45 said, you people are amazing.

I'm going to put all these together and print out a tiny little card that I can reference, and use whichever one feels most appropriate on any given occasion. Rupert is going to find some way to get back at me for this. I hope it involves buying me dinner first. Or after.

Pat Berry :

I'm not sure "amazing" is the right term, Rachel. Unless you mean "It's amazing that so many people have so much free time on their hands."

:

Who has free time? I'm working!

R.L. Hunter :

Oh my, aren't we the sadistic one.
But what's really funny is one of the Google ads that came up was for a "Eye of the Tiger" ringtone.
You wouldn't have access to his cellphone would you?

:
I'm working!

Sure you are. :)

DL From Heidelberg :

Birdman and Fuzz Martin are of course correct; but for the language impaired, the phonetic pronounciation for the German is:
Das ow (like ouch) ga des tee grrrs.

:
Do I have a ton of bilingual readers or do you guys have some super-awesome translator websites that I don't know about?

Instinct :

and Elvish (so I'm a geek, sue me) :)

hehn ehn meoi

:

Morse code: . -.-- . | --- ..-. | - .... . | - .. --. . .-. | -... .- -... -.--

Instinct :

use the morse code one at night with a flashlight :D

That was good G Fresh

:

as a total and complete geek - Jabba-ese

Wonka waassa wil Wonka... ho ho ho

Birdman :

Morse Code -- that kills me! You could blink the sequence with your eyes across the dinner table.
Anybody know semaphore flags?

j gerleman :

For those maritime moments, you can always spell it out in .

:

I'm pretty sure this is the best post ever. Don't quote me on that though.

:
as a total and complete geek - Jabba-ese

I think you mean "Huttese".

...

What?

:

Just to clarify, "working" and "at work" are not necessarily the same thing.

CountrClockWise :

A tigris ora

Pronounced (in Hungarian)

Ah TEEgreesh ohrrrrah

Pat Berry :

Instinct:

What do you mean, Elvish? If you want to be taken seriously as a geek, you're going to have to do better than that. Sindarin or Quenya?

fargus :

This is it in mime:


Wanna see it again?

Pat Berry :

Well, Rachel, we finally found a way to get Hillary's face out of your ads. Now all the ads are for "Eye of the Tiger" ringtones and song downloads! And foreign language training, which makes sense.

Oh, and the waterless toilet is back. I've given up trying to understand why.

King :

As long as we're all geeking out, here's "Eye of the Tiger" in binary (capital 'E' and capital 'T'):

Each 8-digit group represent a single number referencing a single character of the ASCII chart.

"Eye"
(space)
"of"
(space)
"the"
(space)
"Tiger"

The same thing in hexadecimal (two digits per character instead of 8):

"Eye"
20 (space)
6F 66 "of"
20 (space)
"the"
20 (space)
"Tiger"


MrJimm :

Eye of the Tiger nothing. Here's what got me though my MBA program-at-night:

Salary at graduation (1998) $58,000
Salary one year later (1999): $77,500
Salary today: $125,000

BTW Tuition & books? $15,500 (minus tax-free employer-paid portion: $12,000 = $3500 out-of-pocket)

Hours spent: Yeah, it was a bitch for me, too.

Return on investment (ROI)? Sorry, my calculator doesn't have that many digits.

:

Rachel's comment section-- You'll never find a more wretched hive of geekness and nerdism.

The mime comment, however, made me laugh out loud. Silently, in my invisible box.

wendella :

Dear Rachel,

Sometimes I like to sing pop songs in an operatic voice. I know it twists my husbands pickle, but I just can't help it.

Here is how to say "eye of the tiger" in double talk. (my father spoke double talk with the other sailors, so officers couldn't understand them. The trick is to speak quickly.)

Eelfye oelff thelfe telfigelfer

A Recovering Liberal :

*clapping with delight*

Y'all provided a fantastic break from another sucky 12-hour workday (it's not over yet). Mahalo nui loa!

:
This is it in mime:


Wanna see it again?

Q: How do you kill a mime?
A: Wait until it's in one of those little glass boxes and then shoot it!

Q: If a tree fell on a mime in the forest, would it make a sound?

What's black and white and red all over?
Mimes in a chainsaw fight.

:

Whale


EEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEERRRRR

rickl :

How would a whale even know that tigers exist?

(OK, I'm being pedantic. It's the best I can do since I only speak English. But I'll echo k2aggie07: This is one of the best threads ever.)

:

Seriously, MIME and WHALE??

I laughed so hard I think I peed a little.

Oh, and in dog: Rye rov ruh rigrrrr.

fargus :

mightysamurai - just remember that when shooting mimes, one must use a silencer.

fargus :

How would a whale even know that tigers exist?

Well, Eye of the Tiger(shark), then.

:

Depending on which Cultural Anthropologists you consult, there are between three and five thousand extant human languages on the planet today. That's not counting languages that are extinct but for which there may be sufficient historical records to reconstruct 'Eye of the Tiger' from available sources.

We'll get right on those. ;)

:
How would a whale even know that tigers exist?

Maybe they got together in a big meeting and asked each other why the humans call those stripey fish tiger sharks.

brent :

Hey, there. In Hindi and Urdu (two for one, score!) it's "sher ki aankh".

:

Here it is in pygmy:
. . ..

It may look like dots, but thats just because you're to tall to read the letters. Kind of like ...

:

Okay, my brother and I invented a language when we were kids and would speak it all the time in front of our parents and drive them crazy. We spoke it so much that it became like a second language and I taught my son and husband to speak it too. lol It's called Jibivibiribish. What you do is put an "ib" before every vowel in a word, so "Eye of the tiger, baby" would be "Ibiye ibof thiba tibigiber, bibabie. The "ib" is always pronounced with an "i". Hope you can use it, Ribachibel!

:

My gosh. Yesterday there was about nothing here – now – I’m way late with this one. My Arabic translation is: ayn min namir. I have asked a friend to let me know for sure, however, since my Arabic is so limited.

Literally, ayn = eye, or sometimes ayoon or ayun; min = of, from; and namir = tiger.

I did see an earlier Arabic version of this on here and can’t find at-tarf in any of my dictionaries, but al-nimr would be “the tiger” so…

Either way, looks like you have plenty to drive Rupert crazy.

JohnS :

Anybody know semaphore flags?

No, but can find it. Rachel, check email - this critter won't let me paste images (on the whole, probably a -very- good idea).

Lots of images of assorted Tiger-eye things on the web, too. Tiger-eye jewelry, flowers, wood-grain, some mandelbrot-set art, "Tiger Eye (The first book in the Dirk & Steele series)(2005) A novel by Marjorie M Liu" - leave that lying around - sushi, [we] geeks can even get D&D dice made from Tiger Eye.

Seppo :

Do not forget Dagboaen:

"Eye of the Tiger you must be having, hmmm, yes"?

deathbyscience :

BT in SA --

When I studied Arabic at the university, we had wide dialectic variance in the staff (and the ME students learning) so at-Tarf might be dialectic . . .

But you're right on min, I wasn't thinking and constructed possession in iDaafa, for tiger's eye.

So at-Tarf min al-nimr.

Sorry!

:

I sit corrected, you are right samurai - Huttese. That is why you are Mighty. :) But please, don't take my geek merit badge away.


In Cat:

MMMMeeeeoooWWWWWW.

:

Here it is in code (JavaScript/Java):

function showTigerEye(var_eye_count) {

switch (var_eye_count) {

case 0:

alert('Blind Kitty!');

break;

case 1:

alert('Eye Of The Tiger');

break;

case 2:

alert('Tiger Eyes');

break;

default:

alert('Such a freaky tiger you got there...');

break

}
}

:

I'm waiting for someone to come along with a Youtube video of "eye of the tiger" done in interpretive dance.

Patrick :

Canadian = "eye of the tiger, eh"

New York / New Jersey = "fuckin' eye of the fuckin' tiger. You got a problem with that? Are you fuckin' lookin' at me? How'd you like me to bash your fuckin' face in?"

:

The Hebrew is something like "einai ha-kof" (eyes of the monkey).

(I'll be glad to be corrected. My Hebrew is very rusty.)

:

Did anyone do ubby-dubby (Bill Cosby circa 1977) yet? Ubbeye Ubbof Thubba Tubbeye-Gubber.

Alexander :

OK, I figured out the semaphore flags.

A word of caution, dont do this as sea, it could be the firing code for a nuclear submarine!

KitFox_2123 :

Rachel, here's a TRULY annoying one for you: Double Dutch!

Eyube ofuf tuthuche tutigugerug!
(Pronounced: "I-ub-ee uff-uff tuh-thu-chee tuh-tie-gug-er-ug")

It's a code: consonants are turned into their own little syllables:

b - bub
c - cash
d - dud
f - fuf
g - gug
h - huch
j - jug
k - kuk
l - lul
m - mum
n - nun
p - pub
q - quak
r - rug
s - sus
t - tut
v - vuv
w - wash
x - xux
y - yub
z - zub

I learned this from my students. Middle schoolers are crazy.

:

Rachel, now all you need to do is buy him for Christmas or his birthday.

Better yet, come visit Louisiana and take him to an LSU football game, where he will have to gaze at in midfield for the entire game.

:

Forgive me for being anal, but in addition to spending 20 years in the Navy as an Arabic linguist, I'm now a (software) engineer, and you know how anal engineer's can be.

My opinion on the Arabic version of "eye of the tiger" is that translation doesn't necessarily equate to using similar construction between languages. I contend that translating the phrase from English to Arabic and back to English would be rendered as "tiger's eye." "'ayn min an nimr doesn't strike me as the way a native speaker of Arabic would say it. In fact, I would translate that phrase into English as "eye from the tiger."

So, my vote on the Arabic version would be:

'ayn an nimr

I'm currently away from my Arabic resources, but I've never heard "tarf" used for eye, and I would contend that in Modern Standard Arabic, "'ayn" would be the preferred translation.

And I hearby acknowledge that I could be horribly, grotesquely wrong about all this, as has been so often pointed out to me by each of my ex-wives, on many different subjects and on many different occasions.

:

P.S. Engineers' brains tend to know that the plural of "engineer" is "engineers" not "engineer's."

Our fingers, on the other hand, sometimes type without consulting our brains.

Lance de Boyle :

"Eye of the tiger...

In Pelosian...

"My face. My face! I can't move my face."

In Edwardsian...

"My wee wee. My wee wee! I can't find my wee wee."

In Kerrian...

"My jaw. My jaw! I can't see past my jaw!"

In arabic...

"Mmm Mmm. Now THAT'S what I call good camel dung! Maaaa! More dung, please."


[Makes no sense at all.]

:

Pig latin

I-way of-way ethay igertay

zeluna :

What about Golummese??

Tigerssss?

What's tigersss preciousssss?

N. O'Brain :

"Oh, and in dog: Rye rov ruh rigrrrr.

Posted by Sparrow [TypeKey Profile Page] | August 2, 2007 8:45 PM "

Rut roh!

Pat Berry :

Rachel: If the knowledge that you want to have all of our babies (and have said so, publicly, on the IntarWeb) does not drive Rupert insane, I can't imagine what would.

HA! Seriously, best comment thread EVER. I'm gonna have to make a new category for this.

ScottS :

What? No love for the Poles?

Oko tygrysa!

Pat Berry :

New category? Why would you need a new category for this? You already have one called "WTF?", which is basically what we're trying to make Rupert say to you.

:

I'm just commenting on this one at this point so that it breaks 100.

:

100th?

Close, G Fresh! Close. I deleted a double comment above so that bumped you to 99. But you get the prize anyway! I don't have a prize though. How bout just telling you you're awesome? Woot! :-)

:

Doh! *sigh* Well, I guess being awesome is a pretty good consolation prize.

Also, I can't wait to see what the next random phrase is you need translating. :oD

Hook :

GFresh, were you calling Rachel "Baby" in Morse code? ;-)

:

"GFresh, were you calling Rachel "Baby" in Morse code? ;-)"

Whoops, I guess I did. I must have copied and pasted the wrong instance of the phrase from her post into the Morse code translator I found. Come to think of it, I think I used the same copy and paste for the Klingon translation as well. Heh. That'll teach me to be lazy. :oD

:

i'm taking issue with the hungarian one, which actually translates to "nose of the tiger."

just replace "ora" with "seme" (pronounced sem-meh)

:

I just read this whole post aloud to Frank (sans comments), and we are both cracking UP!

Eich :

You could have fun leaving him notes all over the apartment, cars etc.

Binary

Hex
6f

Base 64
ZXllIG9mIHRoZSB0aWdlcg==

ASCII


Now if thats not geek enough for you, I don't know what is :)

Stew Magoo :

I can offer you a Vogon poem on the subject matter of "eye of the tiger"...

Unless you already have that.

:

Deathbyscience: Including the word "min" in the translation makes it "not Arabic." The idaafa construct, 'ein al-nimr, is correct Arabic for "Eye of the Tiger". Using the "min" in the phrase would be considered a translator's error of redundantly using a preposition when it is already included in the construct.

"Tarf" may be correct in some dialect, as you note, but "Tarf" means "the end of" something in both classical and MSA.

ussjimmycarter :

Umm...Some how "Eye of The Tiger" and "Rupert" seem wierd to me...or maybe not...

tookster :

you can go to:
and type in the phrase and it'll translate for you....

Hook :

"GFresh, were you calling Rachel "Baby" in Morse code? ;-)"

Whoops, I guess I did. I must have copied and pasted the wrong instance of the phrase from her post into the Morse code translator I found....

No problem. ;-) The only reason I noticed is that I'm a Ham, and I had to learn code to get my licence. I guess if I'd kept my big mouth shut, Rachel and Rupert wouldn't even have noticed it. LOL

:

Korean: 호랑이의 눈 (pronounced "ho-rang-i-ui noon")

:

In Polish: Oko z tygrysa

:

Scotts forgot the "z"

snoopdogg :

i can't believe everyone here is too white bread and mayonaise to think of our hip hop bretheren...

eyzzle of the tizzle, yo.

otcconan :
Okay, my brother and I invented a language when we were kids and would speak it all the time in front of our parents and drive them crazy. We spoke it so much that it became like a second language and I taught my son and husband to speak it too. lol It's called Jibivibiribish. What you do is put an "ib" before every vowel in a word, so "Eye of the tiger, baby" would be "Ibiye ibof thiba tibigiber, bibabie. The "ib" is always pronounced with an "i". Hope you can use it, Ribachibel!

My brother and I did that as well, but the language was called Brunzlovian. It allowed us to cuss in front of our parents without repercussions (until my mom found the dictionary we had stupidly written up).

And in our language it would be "Engo la tagr->"

the -> is a Brunzlovian character which is pronounced "oi." The character evolved from the word -> "pronounced oi" which meant "arrow," "spear," or "missile."

So it'd be pronounced as "in'go la tag'roi"

:

Poor Rupert! You're so mean!! Mean girl! [snicker]

:

Along with the Eye of the Teyeger, don't forget the closely related Ear of the Tearger and the Nose of the Tnoseger.

:

EEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEERRRRR

You do not speak whale!

:

As a graduate marine zoologist, I certainly do.

It's just that they don't have a written language, so I had to translate into English. The number of times the letter is repeated is indicative of the frequency length of whale sound made by what are called 'phonic lips'.

Translated into conversational English, the phrase is...

Eye of the Tiger.

:

In the infantry it's, "Flaps down, balls to the wall".

:

In Turkish: "Kaplanın gözü".

:

I'm inspired to paraphrase:

You may be geekier than each of us, but you aren't geekier than all of us.

otcconan :

Just a little fyi for you guys.

Geek: a term that was used initially to refer to certain carnies (as in carnival inhabitants) who, as part of their show, bit the heads off of live chickens and other animals (which is called "geeking"). So a geek is really a very disgusting person, something you don't want to be called.

I prefer "nerd," which is a term reserved for people who are smarter than the ordinary, who for some reason like to confine most of their knowledge to arcane subjects such as Star Wars trivia and Star Trek languages, as well as programming in obscure, pretty much dead languages such as PASCAL and COBOL.

A nerd can technically be a geek if he's also the kind of horribly disgusting person who plays WoW all the time while eating fried chicken and leaving the box and bones lying about his house, never cleaning up around himself.

However, a geek is not necessarily a nerd.

Don't ever call me a geek....I'm a nerd, but damn proud to be.

CountrClockWise :

Yah, oops it is in hungarian

A tigris szeme

Ah Teegreesh ssehm-eh

sorry I'm pretty rusty...

:

otcconan, I learned it just about the opposite from what you describe, althought given the historical tidbit about geeks and chicken heads, you may be right on the merits. But I'm still not sure about current usage.

The Geek Squad of tech support guys suggests Geek is currently preferrable to nerd. In my experience, a geek was an enthusiast but was not necessarily lacking in the social graces, while a nerd was.

On a not entirely unrelated topic, when I was growing up, being called the class 'brain' was perjorative. These days, it seems that being called the class 'brainiac' is a compliment. Brains were nerds, brainiacs are your go-to guys for whatever topic they geek out over.

What it makes us for even bothering with the distinction? Erm...

tomg :

English response:
"Eye of Tiger? We don't need no steekin Eye of Tiger"

Milton :

Hi, the chinese, which was given to you in the new simplified, is pronounced lao-who (tiger, make it sound like one word) duh (of) yan-jing (eye). The jing part is said as if you were striking a little bell, so it riiings. (sort of) That babelfish site is really good. Now all I have to do is get my chinese keyboard back in business. I had it working on my last computer, but it died.

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