pocket protector

plural pocket protectors

1. A sheath, usually of plastic, designed to fit in a shirt pocket and hold pens and other small implements, preventing them from tearing or staining the shirt.

   Common numbers like distances would never be expressed in megameters or nanomiles — it would bring us too close to the Dilbertian world of pocket protectors and calculator holsters.

   2009, J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, page 15

2. USmetonymicallyslangA white-collar technical worker such as a scientist or engineer, especially in military and space applications; a nerd or someone with a nerdy job.

   The pocket protectors were clearly jubilant. Magic could hear some celebrating in the background of the transmission.

   2024 August 20, M.P. Woodward, Tom Clancy Shadow State, Hachette UK, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   It was a pocket-protector paradise, its culture defined by the HP way: paternal, collaborative, entrepreneurial, community minded and inconspicuous.

   2005, Time

   My dad is head of the math department at UCLA. Yes, that is where all the pocket protectors go to meet other pocket protectors.

   2012, Annabel Monaghan, A Girl Named Digit, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN, page 5