\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: \begin{flame} 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. \end{flame} Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use@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). Last updated: 1998-09-21
