Origin of the word : GEEK

geekOrigin: 1978
For centuries, a geck or geek was nothing but "a loser, a fool, a simpleton." The word in its various pronunciations was established in the English language as long ago as 1515, attested by the line "He is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also." But in the late twentieth century, Americans made something else of geek.
Early in the century, we started to use geek to mean "a performer in a carnival sideshow, a supposed savage or wild man." Researcher David W. Maurer wrote in 1931, "The word is reputed to have originated with a man named Wagner of Charleston, W. Va., whose hideous snake-eating act made him famous."
The stage was thus set for the next American evolution of geek as another kind of person, one whose talents were concealed behind an awkward exterior. The exact date is hard to pin down, but in student slang of the 1970s and later, a geek was someone who partied too little and studied too much. And when these geeks migrated to Silicon Valley and began building computers and writing software programs that made them millionaires, they gained respect.
In the 1990s, alpha geek was a term of humorous respect for the person in a workplace who knows the most about computers. And the richest man in America was the alpha alpha geek, billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft.