Nerddom is something that one should be proud…never mind. Nerddom is a horrible word and I’m never using it again.

  Being a nerd about something is, at its core, caring about something – albeit something that isn’t considered worth caring about in the mainstream. Being a Doctor Who nerd, like I am (although less so recently, just due to time and age), is caring about Doctor Who, its stories, its production, its characters and its history. Being a music nerd could be anything from caring about different genres of music, their history and their purity, or caring about complex music theory and its beauty. Being an insect nerd is called being an entomologist.

  I think that people who aren’t nerds about anything – people who don’t have the brain capacity to be a nerd, if you don’t mind my saying so – will never understand or have empathy for a nerd. They cannot fathom the attachment that a nerd feels for their area of interest. BBC Merlin nerds understand the passion that those nerds who care about different types of water and water containers have. They might not understand why it matters if your water comes from a tap or a bottle or a cloud, but they can understand the importance.

  I don’t know whether the ability to be a nerd comes from neurodivergence, sentimentalism or being raised the right way. A scary thing, though, is meeting someone who is a bigger nerd about something than you are. I saw a tweet (insert cliché about them being called xeets now, or something) which compared this to liking doughnuts, and then meeting someone who also likes doughnuts, but then it turns out that they built their entire house out of doughnuts. Why do I say doughnuts and not donuts? Because I’m a grammar and English nerd, and care about spelling things the “proper” way, but I think we all know that when it comes to English words, there is no “proper” way to spell things.

  It’s becoming more and more mainstream to not care about how words are spelt, especially with the increase of texting. Every day, I scroll on Instagram and see someone’s used the wrong “your/’re.” And I’m going mad.