nouveau geek

Nouveau geek (French for “new geek”), refers to a person who has acquired considerable technical savvy without the deep foundational knowledge of a computer scientist. This term is generally to emphasize that the individual was previously part of a different educational curriculum, such as liberal arts, and that such education has not necessarily provided the means for the development of web sites or the use of gadgets that were previously unobtainable, but rather the Socratic drive to keep questioning, learning, creating, viewing source, copying and pasting, and using WordPress themes and widgets. The term can also be used in a derogatory fashion by hard core techies, for the purposes of intellectual distinction, to describe persons with newfound knowledge as lacking the experience or finesse to use technology in the same manner as the “old geek”—persons who actually know how to write software from scratch but often have no interpersonal skills or the ability to apply complex concepts to modern or everyday business scenarios.