24 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
24 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
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.
|
|
|