Muggle

muggle

[from J.K. Rowling's `Harry Potter' books, 1998] A non-wizard. Not as disparaging as luser; implies vague pity rather than contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly) popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others' existence - most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts.

In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as `muggle-friendly'. Compare luser, mundane.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

This has been appropiated for use with wizards of a different kind: the demon programmer. A quote from stephen, posting at The Rob Malda Rule at perlmonks.

When you're dealing with nonprogrammers (Muggles? Trivial persons? :) ) it's best to be armed with charts. Nonprogrammers will occasionally panic at screenfuls of text, but they often feel at home with pictures.

An entire family was murdered by a youthful (marijuana) addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an ax he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister.

He seemed to be in a daze.... He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called "muggles," a childish name for marijuana.

From http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/aint/303a.htm