Via a commenter responding to my new Taki’s Magazine article, here are percentages of words in new books that were either “nerd” (blue) or “geek” (red) from 1960 through 2008 (with no smoothing) from Google’s nGram.

You can see a late 1960s counterculture spike in “geek” (probably related to circus geeks and the like), then a slow uptrend for both until just before the “The Revenge of the Nerds” movie in 1984, then faster growth, with nerd outpacing geek until the later 1990s. The arrival of the Internet and big money software deals around 1994 spikes nerd one last time, followed by geek spiking during the late 1990s tech bubble.

Most of the other identity movements of the era were far more top down imposed, with universities and government taking the lead.