<story><title>The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’</title><url>https://liveoverflow.com/the-origin-of-script-kiddie-hacker-etymology/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>INTPenis</author><text>The author might have had more luck grepping through irc logs from the 90s. If they exist.&lt;p&gt;I was also born a bit too late but I was active on IRC during the last 3 years of the 90s and remember the term script kiddie being so much a part of the fabric of IRC that we had already started to type around it, so to speak.&lt;p&gt;For example instead of saying script kiddies I&amp;#x27;d just call myself a kid and it would be implied. Sort of like self-defamation to humble myself before older irc cats.&lt;p&gt;The beauty of irc to me was in part its whimsical nature. Making up words was something that happened almost every day and no one batted an eye.&lt;p&gt;Also trolling was part of this whole scene and no one cared. Everyone knew how to handle trolls and if you didn&amp;#x27;t you were part of todays entertainment.&lt;p&gt;Today it&amp;#x27;s all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game.&lt;p&gt;IRC was truly where culture existed in my opinion. After newsgroups and such, IRC was live. It happened every day, all day. And night. In that sense it would be a much better source for slang terms than zines.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’</title><url>https://liveoverflow.com/the-origin-of-script-kiddie-hacker-etymology/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>This is all pure navel gazing, of course, but:&lt;p&gt;It goes at least back to Pluvius (in, amongst other places, BoW) in 1994, but I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure he didn&amp;#x27;t come up with it either --- BoW itself was an ironic commentary on the whole scene, and wrote casually about &amp;quot;scripts&amp;quot; because everyone knew what that word meant.&lt;p&gt;And so what&amp;#x27;s interesting isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;script kiddie&amp;quot; --- &amp;quot;kiddie&amp;quot; has been an all-purpose pejorative since forever --- but &amp;quot;scripts&amp;quot;, which have an interesting etymology that crosses over between IRC scripts and exploits. &amp;quot;Cookbook&amp;quot; used to be another related term which has fallen by the wayside.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Zero day&amp;quot; is another term with interesting roots, originally referring not to vulnerabilities and exploits but to pirated games; there was a whole &amp;quot;days&amp;quot;-denominated scale for freshness of warez.</text></comment>