28 Ways to Describe Geeks

For the next few months, weekly writing tips will include word choice suggestions. That includes:

• colorful and original descriptions
• pithy words and phrases
• picture nouns and action verbs
• writing that draws a reader in and addicts them to your voice

I keep a  collection of descriptions that have pulled me into the books. I’m fascinated how authors can–in just a few words–put me in the middle of their story and make me want to stay there. This one’s on how to describe geeks.

Click for the complete list of 69 writer’s themed descriptions.

A note: These are for inspiration only. They can’t be copied because they’ve been pulled directly from an author’s copyrighted manuscript (intellectual property is immediately copyrighted when published).

Geek Speak

• Sigh
• Happy happy
• Waves
• Wrinkles nose
• shudders
• blush
• I was buffering
• See you in the stream
• pain in the Net–Slang for a very annoying flamer.
• Didn’t ping on the danger
• blamestorming describe “sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who is responsible.”
• “we can breadcrumb this section so we don’t have to pile up content in the left nav.”
• decruitment–a corporate euphemism for laying off workers.
• power luser–Computer user with the uncanny ability to screw things up so bad that either the damage is irrevocable or restoring from the last back-up is the only hope.
• under mouse arrest–busted for violating online service’s rules
• holy war–Perpetual BBS discussions that never die, the arguments never change, and no one’s opinions ever budge one iota. “Holy wars” are fought over abortion, gun control, Mac versus IBM, Windows versus DOS, and how much nudity to allow in the image areas of online services.
• keyboard plaque–the disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards. “Are there any other terminals I can use? This one has a bad case of ‘keyboard plaque’.”
• looking for Mr. GoodVar–trying to find VAR resources on the Web.
• mecca Slang for anything mechanical (as opposed to “orga,” organic).

Geek hobbies

• Rubic’s cube
• Ham radios
• Poetry for programmers

Geek characteristics

• Over-developed sense of spatial reasoning
• The one man on the planet—outside of Steve Jobs—who actually understood all the settings on an iPhone
• Sees patterns

Bad Geek stuff:

• Use the hotel’s Wi-Fi service to plant viruses on the computers of multiple guests. Once the computers were infected, he could control them remotely, even after they left the hotel. Without their owners being any the wiser, he used his network of zombie machines to covertly send and receive data without revealing his involvement.
• Hacking from a different apartment complex, using a different ISP, and a different set of bounce points to frustrate tracing his signal.
• Go to the autocorrect on a person’s computer. type in a word such as commonly used pronouns to be replaced by stupid words and watch em go nuts trying to write a report.

Most popular collections:

19 Ways to Describe Spies

24 Ways to Describe Pain

57 Ways to Describe Talking in a Novel

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer,  a columnist for TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. You can find her books at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning.