2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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flame
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. vi. To
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speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or
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with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2,
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directed with hostility at a particular person or people. 4. n. An instance
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of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one
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might tell the participants Now you're just flaming or Stop all that
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flamage! to try to get them to cool down (so to speak). The term may have
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been independently invented at several different places. It has been
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reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from
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as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.
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It is possible that the hackish sense of flame is much older than that. The
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poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote
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a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day.
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In Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida , Cressida laments her inability to grasp
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the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then
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observes that it's called the fleminge of wrecches. This phrase seems to
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have been intended in context as that which puts the wretches to flight but
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was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as the flaming of wretches
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would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on
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Usenet.
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