-oid
[from `android'] suff. 1. This suffix is 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); 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. There is a more specific
sense of `oid' as 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].
