flame

1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. vi. To
speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or
with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2,
directed with hostility at a particular person or people. 4. n. An instance
of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one
might tell the participants Now you're just flaming or Stop all that
flamage! to try to get them to cool down (so to speak). The term may have
been independently invented at several different places. It has been
reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from
as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.
It is possible that the hackish sense of flame is much older than that. The
poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote
a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day.
In Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida , Cressida laments her inability to grasp
the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then
observes that it's called the fleminge of wrecches. This phrase seems to
have been intended in context as that which puts the wretches to flight but
was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as the flaming of wretches
would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on
Usenet.

