muddie n.
Syn. mudhead. More common in
Great Britain, possibly because system administrators there like
to mutter "bloody muddies" when annoyed at the species.
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mudhead n.
Commonly used to refer to a MUD
player who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been
known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the
consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When
encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a
mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character,
or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her
from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the
specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than
any other; and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write
because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any
existing MUD. See also wannabee.
To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the
Zuni/Hopi legend of the mudheads or `koyemshi', mythical
half-formed children of an unnatural union. Figures representing
them act as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. Others may recall
the `High School Madness' sequence from the Firesign Theatre
album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers", in which
there is a character named "Mudhead".
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muggle
[from J.K. Rowling's `Harry Potter' books, 1998] A non-wizard. Not as disparaging as luser; implies vague pity rather than contempt.
In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly) popular
children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern
world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the
others' existence - most muggles are unaware that wizards exist,
and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are
perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts.
In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers
would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms
compounds such as `muggle-friendly'. Compare luser, mundane.
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multician /muhl-ti'shn/ n.
[coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user of Multics. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever
promoted the analogous `Unician'.