I'm Susie Dent and in the age of AI I believe being a geek may never have been so important

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

As someone who has spent decades charting language, I’ve learnt to push aside any personal bugbears when it comes to the evolution of our words. English has always been a democracy, going its own merry way without government from above. But one recent development has found its way under my skin, for very personal reasons.

It is the appearance of the word “neek”, a blend of “nerd” and “geek” that describes someone with a strong – and, by extension, “uncool” – interest in a particular subject. It takes me back to my childhood, when I discovered that a love of learning was something to hide rather than celebrate, for fear of being labelled a swot.

For a long time, I hid it away as something shameful, despite the pleasure it gave me and the encouragement of my teachers. Decades later, while filming our new series Secret Genius, Alan Carr and I discovered that not a lot has changed when it comes to the desire to fit in.

The aim of our show was simple: to illustrate how genius can be found in any walk of life. Mensa estimates that there are over a million secret geniuses walking among us, which means most of us will know one of them: the friend who gets to the punchline of a joke way before the rest of us; the colleague who can make complicated calculations at the drop of a hat; or the partner who spots a pattern in an apparently random sequence.

They might be a stay-at-home parent or a bus driver, pharmacist, paramedic, carpenter, train guard or singer – all professions represented in Secret Genius by people who have little idea just how brilliant they are. We are not talking about academic cleverness here, but rather an innate intelligence that sets someone apart from the crowd.

Time and time again, the individuals (ranging in age from 20 to 63) we invited onto the show to participate in fiendishly clever and immersive puzzles told us of their struggles at school, of how they wanted desperately to fit in and so suppressed their natural intelligence, becoming instead the class joker, the constant interrupter or the quiet one who didn’t dare to engage.

Each of them felt different, but each was unsure what to do with that difference other than to pretend it didn’t exist. All they needed from their peers was validation, but for many of our secret geniuses, the recognition they received on the show had come agonisingly late.

It’s true that the trajectory of many of the words once used to belittle people for their intelligence is looking promising. “Geek” in particular has undergone one of the most dramatic shifts of any word in the dictionary, having started out as a 19th-century description of a performer of extreme acts at freak shows, including biting the heads off live snakes and chickens.

The word broadened to include any kind of extreme behaviour, particularly an interest in a single subject, before arriving at today’s keen pursuer of knowledge who is no longer bizarre, but classy. So far so good, but the arrival of “neek” threatens to take us backwards. Ask any teenager: no one wants to be a neek.

It’s time that intelligence in all its forms – especially the natural, curious kind – is shown to be cool. We need to encourage our children to celebrate, not mock, it and to feel fearless when it comes to expressing their interests and ambitions. In the age of AI, being a geek may never have been so important.

There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way in recent years, yet as Secret Genius shows, there is still much to be done. As for Alan, I’ve long suspected he may be a genius himself. And if Celebrity Traitors taught us anything, it’s that he is extremely good at keeping secrets.

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