Talk:newbie

Here's the earliest usages I can find on Usenet via Google Groups:

• newbies: 3 Mar 1988 [1]
• newbie: 31 May 1988 [2]
• newbie's: 16 Nov 1989 [3]

— Hippietrail 01:29, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

A common mistake among newbies is to spell it newby.

The page should also mention prononciation : is it like new bye or new bee ?

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Why specifically internet slang? Come to that, why slang at all? When I started high school (more years ago than I care to think) I was called a newbie. This word has too long a history to be slang, surely. And certainly not internet slang. -- Algrif 17:35, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree it did not originate on the Internet; it is older. Maybe check Usenet for a pre-Internet use there? --Una Smith 05:40, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe {{colloquial}} would be more accurate. Widsith 17:39, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

This is an interesting test of the meaning of colloquial. There are 2400 raw hits in Scholar for "newbie", many of them are mentions, many are in discussions of gaming, usenet, etc. But some concern "newbie" nurses and newcomers or "rookies" in other social settings. Is this merely "informal"? DCDuring TALK 17:56, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Is the adjective sense just an attributive use of the noun? (I'm paranoid when it comes to incomparable adjectives that mean "of or like a [PAGENAME]".)—msh210℠ 17:41, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

I'd say this supposed adj is best interrupted as an attributive noun, since it only works when placed directly before the noun it modifies. We might say "This is a newbie editor" but not "This editor is newbie." -- WikiPedant 17:50, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems so to me, too. DCDuring TALK 17:56, 23 July 2008 (UTC)