chainik

/chi:nik/ [Russian, literally teapot ] Almost synonymous with muggle.
Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn, but
does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as
newbie. Both a novice user and someone using a system for a long time
without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as
chainiks. Very widespread term in Russian hackish, often used in an
English context by Russian-speaking hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. Our
new colleague is a complete chainik ). FidoNet discussion groups
often had a chainik subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg.
su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects often
have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the developers' and
experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is slowly slipping into
mainstream Russian due to the Russian translation of the popular
yellow-black covered foobar for dummies series, which (correctly) uses
chainik for dummy , but its frequent (though not excessive) use is still
characteristic hacker-speak.
