Thread: Posts undeleted
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Old 08-15-2007, 08:21 AM   #35
cratylus
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 153
cratylus is an unknown quantity at this point
Re: Posts undeleted

Actually I'm not that sure I agree. Maybe I was so
distracted by the rude assaults of matt/sarapis/thelogos/whatever
that I didn't notice, but it seemed to me that where people
used the term [noob|noobie|newb|newbie] it was in a
literal descriptive sense, rather than a deprecative,
pejorative sense.

In my mind it's only an insult when hurled as a
direct epithet, and even *then*, it's more of a
referent joke (I am mocking people who mock newbies
by pretending to be mocking you) than an actual insult.

If I am talking with a third party about a
newbie, my reference to the [noob|noobie|newb|newbie]
is typically not meant as belittlement, but as a
simple description of the person's most relevant
characteristic in the conversation at hand:
being inexperienced.

Maybe that's what matt/sarapis/thelogos/whatever
was taking umbrage at....maybe it sounded like I
was trashing new people by slapping them around
with the "noob" label. In my defense I can only say
that if you interpreted my use of the word negatively,
that's your baggage and your problem, not my
responsibility to fix.


I have to disagree here too. There are
lots of places that a person can run across that
terminology before blundering onto this forum.
If, for example, they play Half-Life 2 deathmatches
online, they will quickly learn lots of terminology
we take for granted. If on a chat program (where
one also can become familiar with basic net terms) they
are told to visit TMS because of some awesome game
they can play, that's a way of finding yourself here.

I think we may never *really* know if noob guy
was truly a noob, but in my opinion it is just
as plausible he was as he wasn't.


At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think this
assumes an intentional decrement by Brody of
his nice-a-trons, and I feel this is an unwarranted characterization.

Let's look agan at what he literally said in response to
noob guy jumping up and down hollering for attention:

If folks find that less than kind or less than helpful, seriously, I
don't know where we can find common ground.
And reading hostility, or even lack-of-courtesy, into it is
an excess of imagination on the part of the reader.
IMO.

-Crat
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