Andrew/Flickr Have you ever been called a n00b, noob or newb? It’s a statistical certainty that you have if you’ve ever played an online first-person shooter. Even if you’re not a gamer, you’ve probably been called some variation of “newborn” at some point. But what exactly does it mean and where does it come from?
If you’ve ever wondered about the etymology of the term, how it’s evolved over the years, and what the difference might be between different spellings, then you’ve come to the right place. Sit back, put your feet up, prepare for enlightenment and transcend your new state.
The original beginner
The roots of the term beginner are unclear, but the meaning is pretty obvious even if you’ve never heard the word before. For clarity, here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: “An inexperienced newcomer to a particular activity.”
According to the OED, it is thought to derive from the word “newie” which first appeared around the 1830s and was used in the US and Australia as a word for “something or someone new”. There is also the possibility that it comes from the British state school system (a potentially confusing term as the British public school system actually describes private fee-paying schools) and is derived from slang for “new boy”.
noob or n00b soon became a popular insult in games like Counter Strike
According to the book A Dictionary of Soldier Talk, the term was used among American soldiers during the Vietnam War to describe any new guy in a unit.
Newbs go online
The term newbie appeared on the Internet in the 1980s and can be found in old Usenet discussions, now archived on Google Groups.
According to KnowYourMeme, the earliest archived mention appears on comp.sys.mac where Barbara Dyker posted “The web is too often cluttered with requests for BinHex, StuffIt, PackIt… and rushed articles about not being able to debinhex 4.0 with 5.0, and “’what is a .pit file ?’ I’ve been struggling as a newbie — let’s get some information out there for those new to the Internet so it works for all of us. Or are we going to ignore the newbies like someone suggested we ignore the non-developers??”
It was apparently a friendly term with the same meaning as defined by Oxford, but that will change.
The rise of n00b
At some point in the 1990s the alternative spelling noob began to gain popularity along with its variant n00b. The term n00b came from leet (elite) speak. Leet or l33t speak appeared on message board systems in the 80s, a term originally coined by the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow. It is believed that replacing letters with words and signs and deliberately misspelling words was an attempt to conceal communication with the authorities and to prevent banned or suspicious words from being flagged or censored on message boards.
Leet speak soon spread far beyond its hacker origins. A study from 2005. The Geek’s Goss game: Linguistic creativity in young men within an online university forumexplored some possible roots and also showed how it morphed into something else:
“Instead of merely defining its participants within elite cultural boundaries, ‘let it speak’ is ironically used to reveal ‘wannabees’ (those seeking entry and acceptance into the gaming world, mostly 12-16 year olds). The authors were particularly fascinated by the fact that despite the group’s clear self-demarcation from ‘let it speak’ users and their insistence on use only by the ‘newbies and wannabes’, the group continued to use the language to communicate with each other online.”
What is the difference between newb and n00b?
For better or worse, it was embraced by the die-hard gaming community, and noob or n00b soon became a popular insult in games like Counter Strike. The 2007 Urban Dictionary entry by Slyke The Phoxenix does a great job of describing the difference between newbies and noobs. What it basically boils down to is that n00bs are new at something but willing to learn, while n00bs are new or really bad at something but seemingly disinterested in learning and often act disrespectfully.
By 2009, the term n00b was popular enough that the Global Language Monitor suggested it might be the millionth word to enter the English language. It’s still up for debate whether you actually specify such a thing, but n00b missed it anyway because GLM later opted for “Web 2.0”.
Blurring the boundaries
When a noob finally entered the Oxford English Dictionary, it was defined as “A person who has no experience in a particular field or activity, especially computing or using the Internet.”
It’s still sometimes used as an insult, as players can attest, but the meaning has now fused with newb for many people. As Dr. Michele Zappavigna points out in her book, Twitter and social media discoursenoob is most commonly used on Twitter as a self-rating.
noobs often attack everyone around them in a frantic attempt to rack up a few kills
“Similarly to geek, noob, as used in microblogging, has lost much of its original sharpness and is used mainly to mean ‘novice,’ that is, someone new to a particular domain and therefore lacking in experience and skill.”
Offshoots of noobs in games
Due to its popularity, you will find different spellings of the word noob in gaming circles, including “nuub” and sometimes “nub”. There are also related terms like “noob tube” which refers to rocket and grenade launchers in first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series. The idea is that grenade launchers don’t require much skill to use, and noobs often blow up everything around them in a frantic attempt to rack up a few kills. The term noob is still a huge insult if you play CoD or CS and many players feel that noobs ruin games.
When talking about the term noob in relation to gaming, it is appropriate to mention the Mortal Kombat character Noob Saibot. However, the name has nothing to do with the term noob. Instead, it is derived from the last names of Ed Boon and John Tobias, the creators of Mortal Kombat.
The future of noobs, n00bs and newbs
A check of Google Trends reveals that the term noob in the wider world is far more popular than the term newbie and is often used as a synonym. Searches for the term noob peaked in 2011, but it seems to have largely replaced newbie. The n00b derivative has been in steady decline in popularity, along with the rest of leet speak, since 2005.
Have you reached this point? Congratulations, you are no longer a noob when it comes to the word noob.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn