flame

   [at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]

   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.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {asbestos}{asbestos cork award}{bogue out}{burble}{flamage}{flame on}{flamer}{include war}{LART}{net.police}{nonlinear}{rave}{shitogram}{troll}]