Geeks and Hackers

In Chinese class the other night, the word 电脑 (diǎn nǎo = electric brain = computer) came up in a reading again. One of the students in our class is a professor in the computer science department, and he asked our teacher how to say "geek" in Chinese (strenuously denying that this term might be applied to him). She didn't understand at first, so we had to describe the concept of geek to her. When she realized what we meant, she said there was a word for it. In Chinese, as in English, they have the phrase "book worm" (书虫 = shū chóng), so a geek is a 网虫 (wǎng chóng), or "internet worm"—or maybe "web worm" is a better way to say it. Then she gave us the term 黑客, pronounced hēi kè, which is simply a phonetic approximation of "hacker"; it literally means "black guest".