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.