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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

"Normies" has been in common usage since the 1950s. I guess if you live on 4chan you think they invented everything.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=normie%2C+norm...

Based off of Ngram usage, it'd probably be fair to say that they popularized it at the very least. Nothing new under the sun and all that.

Older usage appears primarily to be as a nickname for Norman.

Sometimes like in Cheers, but plenty of references are using the modern version. Family guy season 2 used it in 1999 4 years before 4chan launched let alone became popular.

Now not everyone is going to use something just because it was on TV, but it definitely played a role.

I looked over use of Normies in books before 2000:

- Earliest use: shortening of "Norman".

- Lots of use by the disabled to refer to people who aren't disabled.

- A little use that happens to be like the article, from substance abuse communities referring to people with normal relationship with substances.

- Some use in monster/vampire fiction.

Then it started to be used a little bit in the present prevailing sense on the internet in the late 90's. Usage exploded from 2000-2015, rising >10x, and almost all of the current use is in the current form of referring to people derisively for having normal tastes, hobbies, and viewpoints.

Yeah, the usage in the article has been common for decades - certainly in the UK. I remember it being used in the 1980s by weed smokers to refer to non-smokers, essentially replacing the word "straights".

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Normie

Surely you understand that slang (and words in general) evolve in meaning and change over time - this is definitely the case with this word, and the more modern usage correlating very heavily with the start of the 4chan era (approximately early 2000's).

Were you also the kid that called people "gay" as an insult and said "no I meant 'happy'?"

Here you go: https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/normie/

Do you realise that the link you posted just proves what you were arguing against?

Did you read it? Or anything I wrote? A word appearing in print with a vastly different meaning for the first time in the 50's does not imply "common usage since the 50's". It then briefly reappears in the 80's in a film (with a different meaning), and then surging with the modern meaning in the 00's is what the article said, if you were having trouble comprehending it or what I said.

Here I'll help:

> Around the time Urban Dictionary logged the term in 2004, it began circulating through different social groups on the internet. In the late 2000s, it was adopted by cosplayers and anime enthusiasts and used to describe people who liked what they considered basic anime or weren’t as passionate about anime. In 2012 normie gained popularity on the 4chan forums. Through the mid 2010s it was a staple on meme subreddits such as r/memeeconomy, usually accompanied by a Pepe meme. As normie proliferated 4chan, the online subculture of men called incels (involuntary celibate) began using it in conjunction with the term blue-pilled normalfag, which derides a man who spends time on male message boards but still gets dates or has a girlfriend or wife. Blue-pilled normalfag is closely associated with normie, though the latter slang has broader and less offensive uses.

Somehow I doubt it was used this way "commonly" since the 50's, but maybe I'm just crazy.

None of that is referring to the usage in the article though, which is weed smokers referring to non-smokers which has been in use since well before 4chan existed - and funnily enough is a "vastly different meaning" from what you're claiming. Can't quite work out why you're so upset.

Not upset - just kind of tired of this ridiculous semantic nitpicking that goes on this site sometimes. I was replying to the reply of the original comment that stated "normies gonna normie" was a 4chan relic (it is) and the reply I was replying to said "normie has been in common use since the 50's." While that may be literally true (it isn't), the phrase "normies gonna normie" is definitely used in the more modern context of the slang word "normie" (again, keep in mind slang changes meaning over time) - so the original reply to this thread is just nitpicking in a way that doesn't really invalidate the grand-grand-parent comment here. Maybe I'm not communicating clearly, maybe you're doing the semantics trolling thing - but I don't think anything I've said here is wrong and people's inability to understand the english language isn't really my issue, although is probably the source of some frustration here. Hope that helps.

I agree with Dr Congo, none of what you have posted from that article relates to 4chan in any way. YUou seem to be very sure about yourself that the term was popularised on 4chan, but everything you use as an example just shows it has been in constant increased use over the last 70 years.

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