I've heard of newbie, but has anyone ever heard of a noob, the term being an insult?

I've seen it usually spelled newb or n00b.

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

I'm not sure. I always assumed my peeps was from AAVE (African-American Vernacular English).

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.

Homey is an old word. I spotted it in Louis Armstrong's memoir about growing up in New Orleans.

In re: peeps, Onion columnist Herbert Kornfeld uses it all the time, e.g. If all y'all daycarin' peeps spot some officin'-lookin' homiez kickin' back an' drinkin' wine coolahz on yo' property, don't call tha 5-0. That jus' mah posse.

We used to have a disk jockey (on a sports station) named "Jeromey the Homey" here in Chicago.

What exactly does homey mean? They stay home a lot?

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...

I hear the word "peeps" a lot in rap music, fwiw.

Homey

Perhaps homey is from Polari omi 'man' from Italian uomo. For those who've never heard of it, there's a nice only vocabulary of Polari here.

quote:

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.

Under "all" enter noob. Under "at least one" enter

intitle:slang intitle:vernacular intitle:colloquialisms intitle:idioms intitleatois intitle:argot intitle:metaphors

The latter entry will create a dropdownwhich will make it unnecessary to copy or retype all that next time you need it

Huh?

quote:

Under "all" enter noob. Under "at least one" enter ...

Presumably these are fields in some web form or other. Care to share where it might be found?

I am likewise in the dark, Dale.

zmj, I hadn't heard of Polari. That vocabulary was interesting!