Some good nominations there, folks! Bill Gates is definitely a very strong contender.

HiLo - Yes, Nerd is a somewhat derogatory term. So what? You can't have a spoken language without having a few derogatory terms in it, such as stupid, foolish, oafish, dunce, moron, etc....

And words DO mean...for you...exactly what you think they mean. What you think they mean has virtually always been foisted upon you by OTHER people while you were growning up and learning about those words. I'll give an example:

"communism", to a communist, means something good.

To your average American, it means something bad.

Therefore, they have very different perceptions of what it means, and they interpret the word accordingly, through the filter of their own perceptions and past assumptions. Whether they know in a textbook sense what the word really means is another matter entirely...and even the textbooks may disagree in some cases.

It's a subjective matter...as is your reaction to the term "nerd", which is a slang term, as far as I know.