Who are you calling nerd? Me, hopefully…

As the nerd emoji is deemed offensive and insulting, self-confessed dork Sam Leith says everyone is missing the point. The geeks have inherited the earth and it is pretty much the coolest thing to be right now

Teddy Cottle (centre) should realise that these days, being a nerd is no badge of shame: just ask the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Wednesday Addams or Elon Musk (Getty/Netflix/Supplied)

A 10-year-old boy from Oxfordshire has launched a campaign to get Apple to change the emoji commonly understood to stand for “nerd”. You know the one: the familiar yellow roundel has acquired thick black glasses, and the eager grin underneath reveals two enormous buck teeth. Teddy Cottle, himself a handsome little bespectacled chap with no obvious beaverlike dentition, thinks that the emoji is “offensive and insulting to all those people in the world who wear glasses”.

He initially planned to write a letter of complaint to Apple, one of the largest corporations in the world, but his French teacher inspired him to think bigger. He has launched an online petition. I don’t know if it will prosper; but with the greatest of admiration and respect to Teddy, I hope it doesn’t. I take a personal interest in this because it so happens that my 12-year-old son is the absolute spitting image of the nerd emoji. And when he has, say, divulged himself of some particularly arcane football statistic, he will often proudly post the nerd emoji by way of congratulating himself.

I think Teddy should see it the same way. When I was his age, long before the internet, being a nerd was indeed a mark of shame. Children like me, who shunned and despised sport in favour of Dungeons and Dragons, who stashed our treasured copies of the X-Men, Daredevil and Cerebus the Aardvark in special protective comics bags to keep them in mint condition, and for whom bliss was the sound of a tape drive loading the early spacefaring game Elite onto a BBC micro, well... we were not the most popular.

Our hairstyles defaulted to the distinctive walnut whip shape that only the flush of a toilet can sculpt, and our Aertex underpants were permanently distended by wedgies. Nobody wanted to be our friend. Nobody wanted people to think they had at any time so much as even considered being our friend. Girls were in no way impressed by our way with deponent verbs in Latin. We were “swots”, “geeks”, “spods”, “weirdos”, “softies”, “dorks”, “walking dictionaries” and, yes, “nerds”.

Gaten Matarazzo as nerdy Dustin in ‘Stranger Things’ (Netflix)

But oh my word, has that changed. Over the last two or three decades, not only has the term “nerd” been reclaimed, but the things it signifies have been propelled to the very pinnacle of our culture. “The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth” lost its freshness as a headline long before Teddy was even a twinkle in his father’s bespectacled eye.

The richest men in the world, for the last God knows how many years, have all been nerds. Bill Gates – who looks like the nerd emoji with a combover – pioneered the trend. Jeff Bezos? Pure nerd. And Elon Musk’s jejune posturings are unmistakably those of the nerd who wants to be one of the cool kids and doesn’t have the first idea how to go about it. Elon should relax; as should Teddy. The nerds are the cool kids.

The comic book and fantasy universes in which nerds used to immerse themselves to escape from the real world are now the biggest entertainment properties in history. And big-budget entertainment doesn’t now just cater to nerds: it actively celebrates them. Think of those dorky kids in Stranger Things, or socially awkward and malevolent Wednesday Addams, or geeky heroes Hank McCoy and Bruce Banner and Reed Richards. This isn’t the age of Bart: it’s the age of Milhouse.

Being a nerd hasn’t stopped Richard Osman from becoming a bestselling author (Getty)

Everyone watches superhero movies, even the sorts of people who used to sneer at them. “Easter eggs” – in-jokes for diehard fans – have become standard issue in Hollywood properties, and the reaction of fandoms can make or sink a big launch. As for video games, the industry that makes them is now eight times the size of Hollywood. And to say it’s nerd-friendly is an understatement. I play an online game called World of Warcraft which involves zooming about a gaudy fantasy world killing monsters and looting treasure with guildmates I’ve never met in real life. It’s bliss. But it’s more than a game to its devotees. The heroes in the community are the “theorycrafters”, whose joy it is to reverse-engineer the game and apply maths and statistics to work out how best to maximise characters’ performance.

Teddy wants the nerd emoji to be replaced by a “genius emoji”; a nerd with his teeth fixed. But that, I worry, would imply that there’s something wrong with buck teeth. My kid doesn’t think so and nor do I. The nerd emoji, to all intents and purposes, is the genius emoji. We should all use it with pride.