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ORIGINS OF THE TERM "FLAMER"
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From "The Usenet Jargon File", vers 3.0

:flamer: n. One who habitually {flame}s.  Said esp. of obnoxious {USENET}
   personalities.

: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).

   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'."

From my own archive of basic knowledge, I recall the origin of the term
"flaming asshole" is from that special activity which for generations has
been a source of great amusement to young men in college dormatories and
fraternities, also know as the "Order Of The Blue Flame". This activity
consists of drinking prodigious quantities of beer in order to enhance
one's output of intestinal gasses which as any biology student well knows
is primarily methane. Methane when it burns gives off a blue flame, so to
prove that those gasses are flamable, the "Blue Flamers" must position
themselves close to an open flame such as a candle or cigarette lighter
(but not too close) and vent a suffucient quantity of methane and produce
a large blue flame in order to elicit oohs and ahs of appreciation from
their "brothers". Flame-on brother.

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| The Common Sense Coach,  email: berkery@crd.ge.com,  tele: (518) 387-5308 |
|       Jack Berkery, Computer Scientist, GE Research and Development       |
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