What does “-bot” of “Obama-bot”, “GOP-bot” mean?
I came across the following sentence of the Time magazine’s article (March 22) dealing with the gaffe made by Mitt Romney’s adviser Eric Fehrnstrom who compared the frequent changes of Romney’s rhetric to an Etch A Sketch as follows:
It’s the type of meme that both conservatives and liberals gleefully participated in, because it’s a much more light-hearted way to make the same argument about Romney — that he has no “core,” as Rick Santorum would say — without describing him as some sort of a pink-slip happy Steve Carell or ruthless preprogrammed GOP-bot.
I also saw “Obama-bots” in the following quote from colesville.patch.com:
Does an extra $40 per paycheck (every two weeks) make a difference to you? ... Obama bots in the Senate killed the one year extension. The two month extension was a compromise agreed upon by the Senate GOP, Senate Dems and approved by Speaker Boehner.
I don’t find the entry of bot in English Japanese dictionaries at hand. Cambridge online dictionary defines bot as
a computer program that automatically searches the internet for particular products, compares their prices, and often gives customers' opinions of their quality
and Oxford Dictionary defines it as
- the larva of the botfly, which is an internal parasite of horses.
- Australian/NZ informal: a person who persistently borrows or cadges from others.
However, neither seems to apply to Obama-bots or GOP-bots.
Is bot an abbreviation of a certain word? Is “Proper noun + bot” a new usage? What does it mean?
That is being used pejoratively and clippingly to compare them to the full word robots.
from the Wikipedia entry linked above:
Fore-clipping
Fore-clipping or aphaeresis retains the final part. Examples: chute (parachute), coon (raccoon), gator (alligator), phone (telephone), pike (turnpike), varsity (university).
Bot is a short form for robot, typically used on the Internet to refer to a program that does something in an automated way. These programs are controlled by some central computer which instructs them what to do. For example, a spam-bot is a program that sends out spam email messages. Spam-bots are installed by viruses and are not under the control of the user of a computer, but are rather remotely controlled by a hacker.
The phrase "ruthlessly programmed GOP-bot" seems to be a direct analogy to the spam-bot. It means a Republican party supporter that does the bidding of the party without any thought of his own.