\begin

text, chat The LaTeX command used with end to delimit an

environment within which the text is formatted in a certain

way. E.g. begintable...endtable.

Used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark

on the surrounded text. For example:

beginflame

Predicate logic is the only good programming

language. Anyone who would use anything else

is an idiot. Also, all computers should be

tredecimal instead of binary.

endflame

Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End

in an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On

Usenet, this construct would more frequently be rendered as

"FLAME ON" and "FLAME OFF" (a la HTML), or "#ifdef

FLAME" and "#endif FLAME" (a la C preprocessor).

(1998-09-21)