Quite often in debates here and on other forums you see two people get locked into a “fight”.
These two people (or more, potentially) are locked into a state where the only thing of importance is beating the other guy.
Now you might cynically say all debates are like that, but at least one clear difference here is that they may not even have a point any more; all they care about is getting in a zinger and, importantly, the last word (and since both are battling to get the last word it drags on and on).
I was just wondering if there is a standard internet term for this, or just a better way of describing it than I have with the preceding paragraph?
The reason I ask is because sometimes when someone has line-by-line responded to me with zingers (each time ignoring context), I want to say “Hey I don’t want to do <X>, can we get back to discussing this properly?”
OP: I think I know what you’re talking about, and no, it’s not a flame war, at least not necessarily.
Very often this happens in Great Debates: a thread, which may have started out as an interesting discussion with relevant input from many different posters, goes on for several pages, by which time there are only a couple or a small handful of people still posting, and those few are arguing with each other over a topic that’s only tangentially related to the original topic of the thread. For example, I’ve seen threads on religious topics degenrate into an argument over the precise definition of “atheist.”
And…yeah, when a thread degenerates to “I said X,” “No, you said X,” “No, I said X, you’re only inferring X,” “No, you implied X,” or when a thread degenerates to “The OED says X,” “Yeah, but Thorndike Barnhart says X,” etc., then a thread has pretty much reached emeritus status. Or ameritus – without merit entirely. And negative points for “Prove your point or retract what you said.” Sure…that’s gonna happen…