flame
1. An {electronic mail} or {Usenet} news message
intended to insult, provoke or rebuke, or the act of sending
such a message. Sometimes a flame will be delimited by marks
such as "flame on...flame off".
2. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively
uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude
or with hostility towards a particular person or group of
people.
{Usenetter} Marc Ramsey, who was at {WPI} from 1972 to 1976,
adds: "I am 99% certain that the use of "flame" originated at
WPI. Those who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that
they needed to use a {TTY} for "real work" came to be known as
"flaming asshole lusers". Other particularly annoying people
became "flaming asshole ravers", which shortened to "flaming
ravers", and ultimately "flamers". I remember someone picking
up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't think "flame on/off"
was ever much used at WPI." See also {asbestos}.
The term may have been independently invented at several
different places; it is also reported that "flaming" was in
use to mean something like "interminably drawn-out
semi-serious discussions" (late-night bull sessions) at
Carleton College during 1968-1971.
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}.
"Flaming" is the act itself; "flamage" /flay'm▫j/ the content;
a "{flame}" is a single flaming message.
[{Jargon File}]
(1998-05-27)