-oid
-oid suff. [from `android'] 1. 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 box (Real Modems
run at 9600 or up); a `computeroid' might be any {bitty box}.
The word `keyboid' could be used to describe a {chiclet
keyboard}, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse
the listener as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. More
specifically, an indicator for `resembling an android' which in
the past has been 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 popularization of the term {droid} in
"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 I can personally confirm only that they were
already common in the mid-1970s -- ESR].
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