jargon (from "android") A suffix used as in mainstream
English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some
otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily
use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that
wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For
example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially
resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a "modemoid" might
be a 300-baud
modem (Real Modems run at 144000 or up); a
"-oid" can also mean "resembling an android", which was once
confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has
recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in
the term "trendoid" for victims of terminal hipness). This is
probably traceable to the popularisation of the term
droidin "Star Wars" and its sequels.
Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for
at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have
probably been making "-oid" jargon for almost that long
(though
GLS and
ESR can personally confirm only that they
were already common in the mid-1970s).
(1999-07-10)