Who are you calling nerd? Me, hopefully…

As the nerd emoji is deemed offensive and insulting, self-confessed dork Sam Leith says everyone is missing the point. The geeks have inherited the earth and it is pretty much the coolest thing to be right now

Teddy Cottle (centre) should realise that these days, being a nerd is no badge of shame: just ask the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Wednesday Addams or Elon Musk (Getty/Netflix/Supplied)

A 10-year-old boy from Oxfordshire has launched a campaign to get Apple to change the emoji commonly understood to stand for “nerd”. You know the one: the familiar yellow roundel has acquired thick black glasses, and the eager grin underneath reveals two enormous buck teeth. Teddy Cottle, himself a handsome little bespectacled chap with no obvious beaverlike dentition, thinks that the emoji is “offensive and insulting to all those people in the world who wear glasses”.

He initially planned to write a letter of complaint to Apple, one of the largest corporations in the world, but his French teacher inspired him to think bigger. He has launched an online petition. I don’t know if it will prosper; but with the greatest of admiration and respect to Teddy, I hope it doesn’t. I take a personal interest in this because it so happens that my 12-year-old son is the absolute spitting image of the nerd emoji. And when he has, say, divulged himself of some particularly arcane football statistic, he will often proudly post the nerd emoji by way of congratulating himself.

I think Teddy should see it the same way. When I was his age, long before the internet, being a nerd was indeed a mark of shame. Children like me, who shunned and despised sport in favour of Dungeons and Dragons, who stashed our treasured copies of the X-Men, Daredevil and Cerebus the Aardvark in special protective comics bags to keep them in mint condition, and for whom bliss was the sound of a tape drive loading the early spacefaring game Elite onto a BBC micro, well... we were not the most popular.