Close Encounters of the Anti-Nerd Kind

I have a habit of eavesdropping on people around me when I am in public places.  It's a natural thing to do.  Natural, of course, doesn't imply much of anything, but I do it.  I was in a bookstore the other day, browsing idly through 2014 calendars, when I heard a woman behind me reproaching her daughter for wanting to buy a "nerd" calendar, because there was "only so nerdy that she [the mother] could be."

The calendar in question was a periodic table of the elements calendar.  Now as far as the sciences go, chemistry is possibly the most easily accessible.  Computer science, for all that I support it, doesn't generally look interesting, biology has way too many spleens*, and physics is really hard even assuming a frictionless universe.  More to the current point, I can't think of any other science in which the central tenants can be presented in such an easy and logically organized way as the periodic table of elements.

But while thinking all this stuff, I was sort of paralyzed with indecision.  Do I defend intellectualism, and how it shouldn't be derided** as nerdiness?  If so, how?  I have no kind of relationship with these people, and while it is a popular conceit of the evangelically religious that people are just waiting for the right word (or tract) from complete strangers, I think that that is rarely, if ever, true.  Also, while it is easy, and a bit fun, to judge people based on snippets of contextless conversation fragments, for all I know there are mitigating circumstances.  Maybe this lady has cancer and has just had radiation explained to her in exhaustive detail and she's upset and scared and in no mood to think more about chemistry.

So I did and said nothing and went to complain to the internet about those who feel free and unashamed to openly deride knowing stuff in a world the luxuries of which were developed by people who dedicated their lives to knowing stuff.  Not to mention people who decline to invest in the future by discouraging younger people from knowing stuff.  I hope the daughter in this situation pursues her interest in things chemistry despite a lack of support.

*For the record, I have nothing against spleens, being as they are a useful sort of organ, and more power to those who want to study spleens.  I, however, find them a wee bit icky.

**I am not convinced that I want to reclaim nerdiness as a good term for a variety of reasons. I know quite a few people who use it as a good term, and I won't argue about it, but I am becoming less and less likely to self-identify as a nerd.