One day when I had nothing to do (well, actually, I had a lot to do, but I didn’t want to do any of it), I decided to play the Google game. This is the one where you input your own name or something else into the field in quotes to see how many search results you get. Because my most recent book, Queen Geeks in Love, was coming out soon, I decided to search the term “geek.” What I found astounded me.
I got more nearly 70 million hits from the word “geek.”
That’s million.
So, I figured that most every term would fetch that many results, or close to it. I started with what I would assume is the antithesis of ‘geek’: the “gossip girl’, which yielded 3,560,000. ‘Beauty Queen” yielded 1,750.000. Glamour came the closest to geek, with 44,600,000, but as you can plainly see, being glamorous is nothing compared to being geeky, statistically. Even the trendy “fashionista” only turned back 5,590,000 results.
So what does this mean? Is Google a valid measurement of popular culture? I suppose it’s not extremely scientific, but it does seem to be in indication of how many sites mention the word, which, by the way, originated as a circus term for a person who bit the heads off live animals. Thankfully, that particular aspect of geekdom seems to have faded out, unless you count Ozzy Osbourne in his former glory days.
If you look to the true measure of what’s out there in the zeitgeist, check your local television listings. This fall, every new show seems to be supernatural (which is within the realm of the geek.) We have Moonlight, a vampire tale. We have Journeyman, Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, and Medium. The biggies