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Comment by to3m | Hacker News Reader

Is `noob' considered acceptable terminology?

"Acceptable terminology"? What does that even mean? What would it mean to be "unacceptable terminology", short of being legally prohibited hate speech?

Are you asking if other HNers are offended by it? Are you asking if other HNers think you should be offended by it? Are you seeking support for a community censure of people who use that language? Are you asking if you can go around calling anyone with less experience a "noob", without context? Are you asking if you can, in some context, write marketing copy that contains the word "noob", and has a desireable outcome? (My answers are "no", "no", "no", "no", and "yes", in case one of those was your question.)

I feel like your question is fundamentally confused, and it's the sort of confusion that leads other people to make snarky comments about "being PC", which drags down useful conversations about healthy community standards. Maybe I'm the confused one, though, so please help me to understand.

I was merely wondering whether this word is OK to use. Do people think it rude and immature-sounding, or is it a simple term that passes without comment?

That's all!

"Rohit ... has been programming professionally for a decade" doesn't sound much like a "noob" to me

It used to be that "noob" was rude (referring to a new or incompetent person who is stupid and irritating) and "newb" was not (referring to a new person who should be treated kindly and helped along). Maybe the meanings are starting to blend together?

Always sounds rude to me, which was my main complaint. At least it's not used in the vocative. But it's also a somewhat childish term, being a contraction (phonetically spelled - and with a foreign accent!) of a term that's already seemingly a diminutive thanks to the "-ie" suffix. Is this the sort of thing that adults do? How old are the people that use it? Probably under 20, I suspect. If that. And immature, to boot.

Whatever happened to the word "beginner"? (EDIT: Ha! They changed it to "beginner", and I didn't notice until I'd posted this.)

I suppose I should finish this post with, "NOW GET OFF MY LAWN".

Maybe there was a time in your linguistic community when those words meant that. I suggest that this is not universal. I've seen lots of people in games use "newb" in a profanity-laden attack, and I've seen people people say things like "c'mon, don't grief the noobs, pick on someone your own size".

What's the difference between "geek" and "nerd"? Ask five language communities, get five different answers. Or ten answers, if you ask the same five language communities again two years later.

When you use slang in a new speech community, you need to expect that to your listener, it probably doesn't mean what you think it means, especially in fine nuance like you're claiming exists between "newb" and "noob" (or "n00b" or "newbie" or "nooby" or "noobie" or ...)

Maybe not universal, but certainly very common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbie#Variants

Uh. The relevant sentence of that WP article has, as its citation, a Forbes article about gamers. You take Forbes seriously, as an authority on gamer culture?

You were making it sound as though this were some niche thing that only happened in my particular social group. I was simply showing that this isn't the case. It's not as though there's likely to be peer-reviewed studies on this, but here's some more links, if you'd like:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Noobs%20vs.%2...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Noob

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20060823

s/noob/child/g

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