Talk:Spod

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People's perceptions of the term spod appear to be changing slowly. Although defined in The Jargon File as "He has all the negative traits of the computer geek without having any interest in computers per se" http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/S/spod.html the term appears to be increasingly used in place of geek.

Wikipedia's current definition of spod borrows from the Jargon file, but Micheal Lawrie, who claims to have coined the term 'spod', states that the Jargon Dictionary's definiton was horribly inaccurate. "This description puts the word Spod across as an insult though which really it isn't and was never meant to be." http://lorry.org/arch-wizard/spod.html

In July 2003, Tim Bray on http://www.kooky.org/spod.php wrote a guide which answered What is a spod? According to Tim, a Spod is someone who knows a lot about computers, and spends a long time surfing the internet. He also writes that "there isn't really any stigma associated with being a spod".

On http://transform.to/~zach/spod.html, Zach writes "Spods are not, as it may seem, a sad lot who spend their whole lives hiding behind a computer terminal (although some do)"

Spod and geek appear now to be interchangeable terms, perhaps geek being used more in the U.S. and Spod in the U.K.

Personally I would love to see Spod used as a term for I.T. Literates, with no insult intended.

Discuss Spod vs Geek? --Spodito 22:58, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

It is quite common on the monochrome_bbs for users to refer to each other and themselves as spods. From a Mono users point of view spod is no different from a geek. It has also spawned the phrase "Spodito Ergo Sum".

patholio 14:39, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Further to the above, it seems Patholio and I are not alone in using spod as a friendly term for geeks. See www.spodwear.com