The Brief

It may conjure images of Family Matters' bespectacled, suspenders-clad Steve Urkel. Or the theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Or Scooby-Doo's Velma.
Or you may self-identify as a nerd due to your keen interest in a certain hobby or subject, like movies or grammar or whimsical parade floats.
Nerd has been part of our lexicon for at least three-quarters of a century, its geeky meaning embodied by some of the most recognizable characters in film and TV history. Still, how exactly it got into our vocabulary remains a bit murky.
"I've been making videos as the Etymology Nerd for a while, and so it's my job to know what the etymology of 'nerd' is," said Adam Aleksic, a linguist, content creator, and author of the book Algospeak. "But the problem is that it's a little bit obscure. It's a very complicated story."
For NPR's Word of the Week, let's nerd out on some word history.

It may have started with a nonsense word

The leading theory about the origin of nerd is that it likely first appeared in print in the 1950 children's book If I Ran the Zoo, written by Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel. (Read more about the controversy surrounding that book here.)
In the book, Seuss' young narrator says:

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, nerd became a midcentury slang term used by U.S. students. It potentially developed from the 1940s word "nert," an alteration of the word "nut" that meant a "stupid or crazy person," the dictionary says.

This screenshot shows the page in the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo" that is possibly the earliest published mention of the word "nerd."

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Internet Archive

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Screenshot by NPR

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If Seuss did have a hand in creating nerd, Aleksic said it would be what linguists call a nonce formation, meaning a word that's made for one purpose then gets reused.
"So if Dr. Seuss did coin the word 'nerd,' he's probably going off other words like nert — which was around — or nuts," Aleksic said. "And then he goes with it. And then other people are like, 'Yeah, that sounds like a nerd. Let's go with it.'"
One year after its use by Seuss, nerd popped up in a 1951 Newsweek article describing modern slang.

"In Detroit," the author wrote, "someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve."

Merriam-Webster recounts some other popular theories for the word's genesis, including the possibility that it evolved from the backward spelling of "drunk," implying that nerds would "rather study than party." Or that it was lifted from the name of a ventriloquist's dummy, Mortimer Snerd, created by radio performer Edgar Bergen. The dictionary says there's no evidence for either theory.

Nerds were outsiders. Then they became cool?

It didn't take long for nerds to take their place in pop culture.

Jerry Lewis portrayed a hapless scientist in 1963's The Nutty Professor. By the 1970s, Happy Days cool guy Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli was lobbing nerd around as an insult, saying in one episode that there are two types of people: "cool and nerds."

The following decade solidified the stereotype. In 1984, the cult classic Revenge of the Nerds was released, pitting a group of outcast college students against their jock tormentors.
But around the end of the 20th century, nerd culture assumed a more respected spot in American culture. The computing revolution made Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — and later internet startup CEOs — household names. Rock bands like Weezer sported thick-rimmed glasses. And you've seen the Star Wars movies, right?
Mathew Klickstein, a pop culture historian, author, and filmmaker, said the '90s independent film movement and indie rock trends started making "the weirdos, the misfits, the outsiders, the nerds, the geeks cool." He noted that it even spawned "nerdy geek chic" fashion styles and more.

"There's questions now about, has the tail wagged the dog at this point," Klickstein said. "Are there people who are claiming they're nerdy, claiming they're geeky, who really just are vaunting or emulating the style without really understanding the substance?"

The nerd goes mainstream

In recent decades, artforms that once may have been considered the realm of nerds — comic books, science fiction, video games — have exploded in popularity across the U.S.

As Parks and Recreation's Ben Wyatt once said in a moment slightly lacking in self-awareness: "You know, nerd culture is mainstream now, so when you use the word 'nerd' derogatorily, it means you're the one that's out of the zeitgeist."
The popularization of nerd culture also has dovetailed with an expanded definition of the word itself.

Now, you don't have to wear a pocket protector and be into computers to qualify as a nerd. Nerds are simply people who are really into a certain thing.

Merriam-Webster defines a nerd as "an unstylish or socially awkward person." But the first definition on its website characterizes a nerd as "a person devoted to intellectual, academic, or technical pursuits or interests" or "a person preoccupied with or devoted to a particular activity or field of interest."
According to Omar Holmon, an author, content creator, and co-founder of the website Black Nerd Problems, "It could be a fan for a spectrum of things and that spectrum being literally anything. It's whatever you are passionate about."

Holmon said nerds strive to spread their enthusiasm to others. "How can I get you to care about this thing that you don't know about, that I know about? And hopefully, you'll be as passionate about it as I am."

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Susan Bustamante isn’t giving up.

The formerly incarcerated 71-year-old woman has repeatedly made the long trip from Orange County to Sacramento to urge lawmakers to pass legislation she believes would help her fellow domestic abuse victims facing criminal charges.

Each time, lawmakers seemed supportive — and then killed her bill in secret.

She hopes the fourth year in a row will be different.

Bustamante is again pushing for a measure, which police and prosecutors oppose, that would allow survivors of human trafficking and intimate partner or sexual violence to cite their abuse as a legal defense when facing charges for violent crimes, with the exception of most murder cases.

Those already convicted could also petition a judge to vacate their convictions. If the judge approves, their arrests and convictions would be treated as though they never happened. Their case files would be sealed and destroyed. Any fines and unpaid restitution to victims would be waived.

“I’m willing to fight for those who are not in the position that I am right now to be able to open my mouth and … fight for this,” she told CalMatters in an interview on Friday.

In 1987, Bustamante was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors alleged she hired her brother to kill her husband, Steven Bustamante, and helped dispose of his body for a $100,000 life insurance payout she split with her sibling.

Bustamante said she wasn’t allowed to tell jurors in her two-day trial about how her husband beat her and repeatedly threatened to kill her. She said she only asked her brother for help.

“The idea that he would kill Steven never occurred to me,” she told lawmakers last month. “Later, he called me to say that Steven was dead. He threatened to call the police and say I planned it. He blackmailed me for Steven’s insurance. I was afraid of having my daughters taken from me, so I gave in.”

Former California Gov. Jerry Brown commuted Bustamante’s sentence in 2017 after learning her story and reviewing her spotless prison record. Bustamante was freed the next year after three decades behind bars.

Bustamante said she would not qualify to have her case vacated under the measure.

California law already allows defendants to cite abuse they experienced and call in expert witnesses who can explain how their suffering affected their behavior. Judges also can factor in a defendant’s history with human trafficking and domestic violence during sentencing. This bill takes it further by allowing them to cite their abuse as a legal defense when charged with a violent crime.

California law also allows those charged with or convicted of nonviolent offenses to petition courts for similar legal relief.

Appropriations committees kill bills

In the years since her release, Bustamante got involved with nonprofits that help people such as her navigate their past abuse and incarceration as they seek to reintegrate into life outside of prison.

Bustamante first testified before the Legislature about the need for the bill in 2023.

Since then, each year at least one of the Legislature’s two public safety committees approved similar legislation before an appropriations committee killed it.

Twice a year, the Legislature’s two appropriations committees meet to quickly and with no debate kill hundreds of bills.

As CalMatters has reported, powerful special-interest groups, the governor’s office and state agencies secretly lobby the committees to kill bills. Legislative leaders also use the committees to kill politically touchy measures that lawmakers prefer not to go on record voting against in public hearings.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to hear Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s abuse bill next month.

Riverside Democratic Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, the new chairperson of the Senate Appropriations Committee, declined to comment through a spokesperson.

Why DAs and police oppose

Law enforcement officials fear Bonta’s Assembly Bill 910 would allow violent criminals, including rapists, kidnappers and child molesters, to burden California’s backlogged judiciary system with a rash of petitions to vacate their convictions.

They say it’s an especially troubling example of how progressive Democrats keep trying to water down penalties for dangerous criminals, with little thought to their victims.

“To basically allow them to walk away from a violent crime in terms of accountability is just absurd policy,” said Greg Totten, a former Ventura County district attorney who heads the state’s DA association.

Totten noted that defendants already have the right to argue they were abused or trafficked during sentencing hearings.

Bonta didn’t return an interview request, but she told the Senate Public Safety Committee last month that “AB 910 is a second chance bill, a dignity bill.”

“Survivors should not spend their lives paying for abuse they endured,” she said.

At least 17 organizations, including ACLU California Action and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, support the bill, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

Supporters argue hardly anyone convicted of violent crimes actually would qualify under the proposed new law.

For the few who do, advocates say it would be much cheaper to allow abuse victims to reintegrate into society without their felony convictions being used against them as they look for jobs, housing and other support.

“If even one person is granted relief under this bill, it will pay for itself,” said Leigh LaChapelle, director of policy and advocacy at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A legal nonprofit has released a report to help medical professionals care for the growing number of people who are showing up at hospitals in the custody of federal immigration agents.

Currently, there are about 65,000 people in ICE detention. Since January 2025, dozens of detainees have died, and many have complained about the lack of medical care in the detention centers that dot the country. As the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign continues, the number of detainees is expected to increase.

The report was created by the National Immigration Law Center, a nonprofit that works to defend the rights of immigrants with low incomes. Last week, the report’s authors gathered for a conversation facilitated by Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the U.S. immigration system.

Kocher said he held the panel to help people consider how mass deportation touches all kinds of institutions that people might not normally think about, from schools to churches to hospitals.

Geared toward doctors, nurses and hospital administrators, the report provides guidance on how to uphold patients’ rights and the institution’s ability to provide quality care.

In the report, the authors describe the experience of a man who sustained serious injuries during a workplace raid in early 2026. For more than a month, they said, immigration agents stayed in the patient’s hospital room — “day and night.”

The agents also controlled when the patient could speak to his lawyer, his family and his medical team. And although the patient had a broken leg, the officers “insisted on shackling him to his bed.”

Experiences like these raise urgent, practical questions the authors seek to answer for their colleagues, including:

• Can a nurse call the family of a patient in ICE or CBP custody?
• Can a doctor ask an immigration officer to leave the room during a physical examination?
• Can ICE or CBP force a hospital to discharge a patient who is not medically stable?

To this end, the report provides an overview of the laws and policies that pertain to patients in civil detention.

It also includes sample scripts to help doctors, nurses and other staff have legally valid, assertive conversations with federal agents when making requests, including asking for privacy to conduct examinations and the removal of handcuffs and other restraints. Through a summary of law enforcement agencies’ chain of command, medical professionals also learn how to escalate an issue if federal immigration agents refuse to comply.

Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the nonprofit and one of the report’s authors, stressed the importance of approaching the planning without being “unnecessarily combative.”

“The last thing we want with this report going out in the world is to de-incentivize ICE bringing people in for care,” she said.

Through an unnamed spokesperson, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, said that when federal agents take detainees to the hospital for medical care, "officers accompany them for their monitoring, safety of the staff, and the public."

Navigating a climate of fear

The report also notes that immigrants who have permission to work in the U.S. could be part of hospital staff. This includes people with a green card, visa, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who have also been subject to detention and even deportation. Authors warn that some people may assume that immigration officers are only interested in undocumented immigrants, but agency practice suggests otherwise.

“When there's an ICE officer who's walking around, oftentimes in plain clothes but armed, that has a chilling effect on everyone in that hospital,” Ibañez Whitlock said.

Theresa Cheng, a civil rights attorney and emergency physician at UCSF who also authored the report, described the dread she’s felt treating detained patients in the company of federal immigration agents — "right next to the pediatric emergency room waiting [area].” For Cheng and her colleagues, the fear of watching others get detained has become part of their working conditions.

As a result, the report also walks medical professionals through the importance of establishing clearly-defined private areas and protocols on how to proceed if an immigration agent arrives with a patient. The authors stress that hospitals should prepare everyone at their respective facilities to interact with immigration officers, including non-medical staff.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

California prisons are increasingly relying on an unusual fire alarm system: humans.

Between 2020 and 2025, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spent nearly $50 million on “fire watch” staffing costs. In recent years, prison employees have spent roughly 270,000 hours monitoring for smoke or fire.

They patrol prisons and visually inspect different areas during their shifts, according to job postings reviewed by CalMatters.

That’s because the majority of California’s 31 prisons have deficient fire alarm systems and it would cost $1.5 billion to replace them all, according to the department’s annual report submitted in January.

In the face of outdated, malfunctioning and inoperable fire alarm systems, the Office of the State Fire Marshal ordered the department to run fire watch coverage until it repairs or replaces its fire alarm systems.

“This process has come at a significant expense to the department in staff costs for fire watch coverage,” corrections officials wrote in a recent $15.2 million budget request to support next year’s coverage.

It’s a drop in the bucket for the department’s $14.6 billion budget, but costs continue to balloon.

The department in June said it was on track to spend roughly $40 million for last year’s fire watch coverage, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. That’s roughly $25 million over its budgeted authority, the office said.

Replacing a single prison’s fire alarm system costs between $3 million and $87 million, according to estimates in the system’s facilities master plan.

Caitlin O’Neil, who monitors the corrections budget as a principal fiscal and policy analyst at the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said the department has historically used correctional officers for fire coverage because the assignment requires keys and access to move about the prison freely. Their fire watch hours are typically coded to overtime.

The base pay for an experienced correctional officer is $9,647 a month, according to a 2024 salary survey.

But O’Neil said the department is exploring whether it can achieve fire watch coverage with a lower cost job classification — recognizing that correctional officers have more capabilities than just looking for fires. According to O’Neil, the department is piloting a fire watch program at Solano State Prison. There, fire watch positions are classified as an “office assistant” and report to a correctional sergeant.

The pay for that position tops out at $4,357 a month, according to a job ad.

Royal Ramey, a formerly incarcerated firefighter who co-founded the nonprofit organization Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, said fire safety inside correctional institutions is non-negotiable.

“People who are incarcerated, as well as the staff inside these facilities, deserve reliable systems and strong emergency protections that keep everyone safe,” he said. “In situations involving fire emergency response, there can be no gaps in protection. But the priority must also remain protecting lives while continuing to advance permanent and reliable infrastructure solutions.”

But Matt Cate, who was California’s corrections secretary under former Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, said he was skeptical about the spending because people are paid to stand around and look for a problem that doesn’t exist.

“Large-scale fires in prisons are extremely rare because prisons are made of concrete and steel,” he said. “There’s a fire department attached to each prison and there are people throughout the prison who are there all the time. It’s staffed 24-7.”

According to Cate, the state has “very strict” regulations to manage fire risk in prisons. He said that puts the department in a position of either upgrading its fire alarm systems for hundreds of millions of dollars or requesting incremental cash each year to meet those regulations.

“It’s a little like deciding, do we buy the house or do we rent?” Cate said. “It's ultimately the governor's office and the Legislature who have to decide how much to invest versus how much to plug the problem through adding additional staff.”

Kristen Cowan, who studies the impacts of extreme weather disasters in prisons and jails as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, said she did not know it was legal for prisons to have inoperable fire alarm systems.

“This is baseline disaster preparedness,” she said. “It’s certainly concerning to know that that (technology) is missing. It makes you wonder what else is missing in the facilities.”

Cowan said the department’s reliance on fire watch positions in lieu of up-to-date technology could create big delays in fire detection, risking more injuries, deaths and detrimental health impacts from smoke exposure.

“We wouldn’t let anyone else live in a place that doesn’t have a smoke detector,” she said.

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Federal prosecutors filed a motion Monday to drop their case against labor leader David Huerta, a year after he was arrested protesting an ICE raid in downtown L.A. last summer. His arrest was one of the most dramatic moments of last summer, sparking a firestorm of criticism.

The federal government had charged Huerta, who leads Service Employees International Union California, with a misdemeanor, accusing him of obstructing, resisting, or opposing a federal officer during the first day of immigration sweeps across the region. Prosecutors had originally charged him with a felony, which carried a maximum sentence of six years in prison.

The charge against Huerta goes back to June 6, 2025, when he showed up at Ambiance Apparel in downtown L.A., a workplace where federal authorities were executing a warrant. He was arrested and held for three nights in the Metropolitan Detention Center Los Angeles.

In the original criminal complaint filed in June, a federal agent described Huerta and others gathering outside of a gate at the workplace "effectively preventing law enforcement vehicles from entering or exiting the premises through the gate to execute the search warrant."

According to SEIU, Huerta was injured during his arrest and treated at a hospital while in federal custody. The union said that he was exercising his First Amendment right to document law enforcement.

"It has been the objective of my attorneys to defend me against an administration that has violated the very foundation of our civil rights as a society and country," Huerta said in a statement provided by SEIU. "Our motions exposed a case that never should have been brought because it violated my constitutional rights."

Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, said in a statement that the criminal case against Huerta should be fully dismissed by the end of the month. McEvoy said Huerta had "been compliant" with the terms of his bond.

"The Department of Justice does not arrest people for peacefully protesting," he said in a statement.