Noob vs Newb And Why it Matters

[That One NPC 58]

Experience has taught me that the vast majority of you will be too young or uninformed to understand, but I'm going to try anyway. The blatant shenanigans have gone on for far too long, and someone has to say something.

 

 

I play a TPS MMO for 360 called Defiance. I don't play often anymore, but I maintain an account and a Leadership role within my respective clan. Earlier this month someone had the audacity to call me a "noob" because I don't have (or need) a supreme shield. After humiliating him not once, but twice through dueling, I proceeded to educate him in front of the entire North American server in Zone Chat.

 

Noob is a term we frequently hear thrown around in cheap. And if you've ever taken or plan to take the time to call someone a noob, you're going to want to pay real close attention.

 

The correct spelling is Newb. Newb as in newly registered, new to the way things work, new account, and so on. I mean after all, we'd never say, "What are you, noo?" Because that would make us look like a total foot sandwich, right?

 

Noob, or the even rarer, more idiotic n00b, is what newbs say when they're trying to be cool. So what went wrong? An entire generation of newbs grew up, and noob became the norm... I mean, look, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America... It's just the age we live in, folks.

 

 

Someone had to say something, because again, the shenanigans have gone on for far too long.

Edited July 28 by That One NPC

[Oozarts 3]

To be honest, I didn't know that! I grew up playing french MMOs and in french communities, and as far as I know no one ever used 'newb', only 'noob' (I guess because in french, Newb would sound really weird, like neh-v-b, or neh-w-b, and noob just sounds nice (same as in english)).

I actually thought that the english equivalent to the French's noob is 'newbie', didn't know English gamers says Noob too xD

Edited July 28 by Oozarts

[FranklinX 21]

It's actually newbie, not noob or newb. I'm old school and always talk and write in proper English. This is just a personal preference. This generation has a major cultural problem in education such as "alternative facts" (lies) and refusing the truth. It's not about a person getting a PHD. It's about today's people just ignore facts to please their personal beliefs.

 

This topic reminds me of when I first started playing Cardfight!! Vanguard. I was called a newb because it was my first experience playing, but I already knew the rules from watching the show. I crushed all of the experienced players. 

[Kayzee 2,629]

I don't really want to be needlessly contrary again so soon, but I am going to have to bring up the old "prescriptionist vs descriptionist" debate. You may believe that newb or newbie is more 'correct' then noob, but the problem with this kind of logic is that language is kind of alive. Words change and mutate over the years, new ones are born and old ones die off. In short, like it or not you could say language is really nothing more then a collection of dank memes. :P

 

This is not a new thing either. For example, did you know that it is believed 'ok' started as a kind of tongue in cheek abbreviation for a deliberate misspelling of 'all correct' ('oll korrect') that was popular in the 1830s? If you want to go even further back, it's kind of silly to talk about correct English when half of the words in Modern English actually come from French. I can't help but mourn a little when I think about what English could have been like if the whole Norman invasion thing never really happened, but I am rather fond of the language we got anyway.

 

Though correct or not,  I think noob has a slightly different shading to it then newb or newbie and is still rather insulting. I have heard it described like this: A newbie is simply someone who is new. A newb is someone who is new and as a result doesn't know what they are doing. A noob is someone who doesn't know what they are doing and never learns and thus is doomed to be a noob forever even if they have been around a while. And a n00b is a noob who thinks they are '1337' because they can replace letters with numbers. :3

 

Sidenote: When it comes to "alternative facts", I will just say I think a lot of people underestimate just how easy it is to fall into that kind of thinking. I honestly don't believe that people are as dumb as some people seem to think, it's just that the truth is actually a really tricky thing to get a handle on and people are often just caught up in their own little lives and don't bother trying. And I don't think that's a new thing either.

Edited July 28 by Kayzee