Newbie is typically used as an insult. n00b is pretty common in 1337 or "leet"(from "elite") speak, probably going back at least a decade. There is a tendency in leet speak to insult everyone who isn't "leet". People who are newbies are especially scorned, and the leet speak for newbie is "n00b". This is probably how it acquired the insulting connotation you've heard.
Recently, in some games, like WoW(World of Warcraft), the term has been further shortened to "nub", and pronounced as such.
Is leet speak where the term "my peeps" meaning "my friends" (short for "my people," I guess) comes from? I first heard this term a couple of months ago from a younger friend, a woman in her '30s, and last week, from my younger son, who is 29.
WM
Posts: 1390 | Location: Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
I'd thought so too, zmj. However, OED's etymology gives no indication. Its first two quotes don't seem to be AAVE, but they clearly antedate netspeak.
1973 M. GORDON & G. GORDON Informant xli. 155 At 7:45 a.m. the ‘peeps’ trooped in yawning. 1988 H. ENFIELD Wad & Peeps 94/1 Golf, the sport of badly dressed peeps all round the world.
Peeps is definitely not from leet speak. Most of the terms in leet speek have letters replaced by numbers. For example, "owned" becomes "0wn3d", and later became "pwned", which led to the phrase "you just got powned".
After some further thought, "peeps" doesn't seem to fit in with any AAVE that I've heard. The term from some time ago would have been "homeys", or something similar, although this may be out dated at this point.
I think it originally meant someone from your hometown or neighborhood, perhaps a contraction of hometown boy. Armstrong's usage was along the lines of "we were playing in Philadelphia when I ran into my homeboy Kid Orrey". The further contraction to "homey" may be more recent.
I read an article or two from the Onion online occasionally, but I never read Kornfeld. He does refer to the homeys in that sentence later as "homeboys:"
quote:
The homeboys got they asses outta there befoe they could be busted foe vagrancy,
Was really surprised to see anybody writing in what we used to call Negro dialect in these enlightened times, even in a hilariously outrageous humor publication. Seems like sort of an ignorant rich-boy thing to do...
Posts: 1390 | Location: Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Was really surprised to see anybody writing in what we used to call Negro dialect in these enlightened times, even in a hilariously outrageous humor publication. Seems like sort of an ignorant rich-boy thing to do...
I think the target of ridicule are the nerdy white guys who try to talk like gangstas.
atois intitle:argot intitle:metaphors
