Lamer

For other uses, see Lamer (disambiguation).

Lamer is a jargon or slang name originally applied in cracker and phreaker culture to someone who did not really understand what he or she was doing. Today it is also loosely applied by IRC, BBS, and online gaming users to anyone perceived to be contemptible. In general, the term has come to describe someone who is willfully ignorant of how things work. Altough his obvius origin is from the word "lame", it is also known for coming from the expresion "lame excuse".

The term is derived from lame. A lamer is widely understood to be the antithesis of a hacker. While a hacker strives to understand the mechanisms behind what he or she uses, even when such extended knowledge would have no practical value, a lamer only cares to learn the bare minimum necessary to operate the device in the way originally intended. Thus, a lamer is usually indistinguishable from someone who is too lame to understand why something works even if they wanted to. A lamer's attitude is summed up by the phrase, "I don't care how it works, just that it does".

The usual definition of a lamer is someone who acts lame. That could be using tactics that are generally accepted as overpowered, "camping" (another gamer term) which means lying in wait all the time without necessarily accomplishing anything useful, jumping around with no purpose. In fact, almost all negative gaming terms fit under the term lamer; the exceptions are terms that apply to newcomers or players who are bad at playing.

Origin

At least one example of the term "lamer" to mean "a dull, stupid, inept, or contemptible person" appeared as early as 1961.[1] It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by "Lamer Exterminator", the most famous and feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of the string "LAMER!".[2]

In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Lamer". The Oxford English Dictionary, March 2014.
  2. ↑ The Jargon File

External links