geek cuisine
The other night I watched Nightmare Alley, the 1947 noirish thriller starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. It’s set around a travelling carnival, and really does emphasize the seamiest and dirtiest side of the noir genre.
So I’m watching this movie and I start seeing the word “geek” written on the sides of a lot of the caravans, and I’m thinking “geez, I thought geeks were social outcasts now, but this is nothing on the Forties, when they were obviously such outcasts that they were literally treated as circus freaks!”
I didn’t know the half of it. To my shock and amazement, when the “geek” himself finally showed up on screen, he was this lumbering sub-human person who feasted on live chickens right before the audience (great piece of entertainment, you know — I always love that humanity has historically found entertainment value in witnessing the slaughter of animals for sport or spectacle). Just why the hell, I wondered, is this freak of nature who feasts on raw chicken being called a “geek”? Was this the grim punishment for being an adult comic book fan in the Forties, perhaps?
Wikipedia sums it up thusly:
A geek is an individual who is fascinated by knowledge and imagination, usually electronic or virtual in nature. Geek may not always have the same meaning as the term nerd. The Merriam-Webster definitions are “1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake 2: a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked 3: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity,” though these are only three of many definitions.
This really gave me pause when I read the Merriam-Webster definitions, because there written boldly was the whole issue that had given me pause. Just how the hell does a word go from meaning “a circus freak who bites the heads off live chickens” to “an obsessive enthusiast” (which is the Oxford definition)? The only explanations I can come up with are hardly flattering to geeks — that so-called “obsessive enthusiasts” were so reviled by the general community that only a word whose meaning was as vile as “geek” could be sufficient to level at them.
Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear oh dear. Anthropologists and etymologists could have a field day with this whole issue, and you know what? I think I’ll leave it to them. Suffice to say that it was quite an eye-opening experience to watch a geek — one of us, man, or so I thought — turn out to be nothing more than a circus freak who consumes live chickens for the delectation and amusement of some frankly astonishingly crude and barbaric Middle-American citizens. Hadn’t this sort of behavior gone out of fashion with the fall of the Roman Empire?
I’ll tell you, I’m going to have trouble dealing with the term in the same way ever again.
But I’ll tell you something else, that on second thought, is eating a live chicken really so bad? Maybe, maybe it just tastes good… Say, I’m feeling a little peckish. I’m a geek. Maybe I should go and try eating something really fresh for a change…
Technorati tags: geek, Nightmare Alley.