flame

messaging To rant, to speak or write incessantly and/or

rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a

patently ridiculous attitude or with hostility toward a

particular person or group of people. "Flame" is used as a

verb ("Don't flame me for this, but..."), a flame is a single

flaming message, and "flamage" /flay'm*j/ the content.

Flamage may occur in any medium (e.g. spoken, electronicmail, Usenet news, World-Wide Web). Sometimes a flame

will be delimited in text by marks such as "flame

on...flame off".

The term was probably independently invented at several

different places.

Mark L. Levinson says, "When I joined the Harvard student

radio station (WHRB) in 1966, the terms flame and flamer were

already well established there to refer to impolite ranting

and to those who performed it. Communication among the

students who worked at the station was by means of what today

you might call a paper-based Usenet group. Everyone wrote

comments to one another in a large ledger. Documentary

evidence for the early use of flame/flamer is probably still

there for anyone fanatical enough to research it."

It is 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.

Usenetter Marc Ramsey, who was at WPI from 1972 to 1976,

says: "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.

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.

[Jargon File]

(2001-03-11)