I can never remember my Meyers-Briggs personality index, probably because I’m boringly in the middle of most of the traits, but I know that on the playground index I occupy a strange vertex between nerd and bully.
This is a curious position because you’re both somewhat potty-mouthed and scary but also inherently uncool, depending on the social demographics that you’re around. Your predilection for using words like “predilection” means the archetypal Nelson-on-The-Simpsons bullies will always be your superiors, and you’re even more likely to get wedgies because you can’t keep your mouth shut around them.
This is when it becomes clear that in the nerd-bully vertex, the nerd part comes first. Many nerds are contented with eating Tootsie Roll pops by their computers and shunning the outside world, but the rare nerd’s Target-brand sweatpants and sincere love of playing Typing Tutor can lead from insecurity to angry refusal to be a passive agent playing WOW as a form of escapism. (No offensive to WOW people.) Your inner nerdy tendency toward overanalysis is turned outward on the world, and your dissatisfaction turns into prankster-like pestering.
For example, emasculating people has been one of my talents since childhood. I remember my childhood friend Tony becoming occasionally outraged because my nickname for him was “fairy” and during a distinct bullying bout I announced that my brother-in-law was “a girly boy” at one of his first dinners with our family. To be fair, I was too young to understand much about how sexuality worked and what the implications of those words were, but I had a strange urge to use them at a fairly “precocious” age.
What happens in the daily life of the nerd-bully? It usually looks something like this: The nerd part of you makes your natural setting something like “a Latin class” or “a seminar on leadership.” But while you are at said nerd event, you are often clustered with other nerd-bullies, snorting every time the announcer uses the word “indubitably.” The problem is, your mild intimidation factor is quickly canceled out when someone draws from your library of nerdiness, learning about your stint on the debate team or the fact that you practiced martial arts for several years as a teen.
But being a nerd-bully isn’t all bad. The older you get, the more the Nelson-type bullies go to juvey or end up becoming violent bartenders, and it’s just you left at your creative agency job, harassing people with jokes about Javascript.
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