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lowlife

  • noun Personae nowhere near making wiz; non-highlife. Occasionally the term may be used more specifically to mean personae that are low level, but normally it refers to the vast majority of players who have aspirations of making wiz but do not yet possess the necessary experience. Its original usage was as a formal collective noun, 'a lowlife of mortals', but increasingly it became used as if it were a class eg. "There's always a lot of lowlife around late in a reset." This allowed individuals to be attributed membership of the group: "Don't bug me, you're just a lowlife", and thereafter the plural form lowlifes (or occasionally lowlives) arose. Any of these variations may be hyphenated, but normally only by people learning the term; otherwise, doing so may serve as a means of emphasis: "You haven't played for a year! You're low-life now!" implies they've been away so long they're probably at the same stage as people just starting up. See highlife, which has much the same variety of use.

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23rd September 1999: lowlife.htm