Flame War/Quotes

On the surface you seem to make some valid points about technology... But your e-mail address reveals your newbie identity.
You're probably a goat herder or a cartoonist.

—Dilbert

Flame War!

—Strong Bad, email 175: pizza joint

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.

—The Jargon File