The story
La Jolla, California1950
In If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, a boy called Gerald McGrew imagines the animals he would collect if the zoo were his. He would sail to Ka-Troo and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too. In the picture the Nerd is small, tufted, scowling and yellowish, and looks like it has been asked to do something it does not want to do.
That is the first time the word appears in print anywhere. The next time is October 1951, in Newsweek, which reported that in Detroit someone who used to be called a drip or a square was now, regrettably, a nerd. In between, nothing. Nobody has found the bridge from a children’s book about a zoo to the slang of Detroit teenagers, who were not the audience for Dr. Seuss and who used the word to mean something the Seuss creature is not.
There are other theories. Mortimer Snerd, the dim-witted dummy of the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Knurd, which is drunk backwards, from students who did not. None has a paper trail. The word spent the sixties spelled nurd, the seventies as an insult, and then something changed. Revenge of the Nerds in 1984, the personal computer, and a generation of very rich men who wore the word like a badge. It is now closer to a compliment than an insult, and the people it describes are the ones who run things.
The gap
The word for the person who checks everything has an origin nobody can check. It surfaces twice within a year, once as a fantasy animal and once as an insult, and the best evidence for a connection is that there is no better one.
That would bother a nerd. It should. It is exactly the kind of loose end that makes this site.