In multiplayer online gaming, the term "Smurf" (noun) is used to refer to an experienced player who creates a new account for the purposes of being matched against inexperienced players for easy wins. Where does this usage of the word come from?
Learn English – Where does the term “Smurfing” come from
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One definition of 'tuck' from The Free Dictionary relates this word to food, which I'm sure we've all heard before:
tuck away/into Informal:
To consume (food) heartily.
Though not definitive, there are two excerpts from Wikipedia worth considering...
Regarding the origin of 'tuck' in relation to shops:
The term "tuck", meaning food, is slang and probably originates from such phrases as "to tuck into a meal". It is also closely related to the Australian English word "tucker", also meaning food.
And, regarding the origin of 'tuck', in itself:
"Tucker" may originate with the lacework at the top of Nineteenth Century women's dresses, but the origin of its use in regard to food probably arises from the popular shops run in England by various members of the Tuck family between at least 1780 and 1850. The earliest reference found is to one Thomas Tuck whose famous "Tuck's Coffee House" in the university city of Norwich in Norfolk UK attracted many academics.
You seem to be asking about the origin of the term as used in category theory. The history of the term there is somewhat unclear, but it can at least be traced back a little ways:
The term is sometimes attributed to Mac Lane, but this seems to be inaccurate; however, the widespread use of the term is probably due to his influential "Categories for the Working Mathematician", replacing the remarkably terrible term "triple".
The frequent but unfortunate use of the word "triple" in this sense has achieved a maximum of needless confusion, what with the conflict with ordered triple, plus the use of associated terms such as "triple derived functors" for functors which are not three times derived from anything in the world. Hence the term monad.
Mac Lane's use of the term was apparently prompted by J. P. May:
The name "operad" is a word that I coined myself, spending a week thinking about nothing else. Besides having a nice ring to it, the name is meant to bring to mind both operations and monads. Incidentally, I persuaded MacLane to discard the term "triple" in favor of "monad" in his book "Categories for the working mathematician", which was being written about the same time. I was convinced that the notion of an operad was an important one, and I wanted the names to mesh.
Elsewhere, Ross Street attributes the term to Jean Bénabou:
Meanwhile Jean Bénabou had invented weak 2-categories, calling them bicategories. (...) He pointed out that a lax functor from the terminal category 1 to Cat was a category A equipped with a "standard construction" or "triple" (that is, a monoid in the monoidal category [A, A] of endofunctors of A where the tensor product is composition); he introduced the term monad for this concept.
The attribution to Bénabou is also mentioned here.
The motivation for the term is to suggest a relationship with monoids, as can be deduced from the construction given in the quote above, and the Greek root "monos" comes second-hand. The connection to philosophy in general, or Leibniz in particular, is often asserted but never to my knowledge supported in any way. More likely if anything would be a connection to the term "monad" used in non-standard analysis, also related to Leibniz, but I'm not sure what the conceptual link there would be. An anecdote from Michael Barr relates the first use of the term:
(...) The attendance consisted of practically everyone in the world who had any interest in categories, with the notable exception of Charles Ehresmann. (...) One day at lunch or dinner I happened to be sitting next to Jean Benabou and he turned to me and said something like "How about 'monad'?" I thought about and said it sounded pretty good to me. (Yes, I did.) So Jean proposed it to the general audience and there was general agreement.
The off-the-cuff nature of the suggestion, and immediate positive response from a large audience, suggests that there's probably no written record of the term being introduced formally. It's certainly possible that the word was borrowed from use in philosophy or elsewhere, but in any case there appears to be no connection more meaningful than the level of "cheap pun".
As far as I know, the only way you're going to get a better answer than that is by asking Bénabou himself.
Best Answer
This definition of smurfing comes from 1996 and the game Warcraft II when certain well-known players made up new names, pretend to play badly, then beat the other players. They picked the names PapaSmurf and Smurfette.
It was used in alt.games.starcraft, and defined in April 1999 as:
An origin was offered in the same group in February 1999:
A Warcraft II: Glossary defines:
The earliest definite use of smurfing I found was in alt.games.warcraft in August 1996:
There was also a reference in alt.games.warcraft that some experienced players were "probably smurfs" in July 1996.
More description:
A quote by Shlonglor from 2003:
And an extract from an August 1996 game report ("The Smurfs vs Spiderman(Zima), Red Barron, and Void(idiot)") by Warp!:
And then by Shlonglor, this may be the earliest description: