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#1 2006-02-23 18:00:34

Sili
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 2006-02-23
Posts: 13

Troll vs. trawl

I’ve recently taken up reading webcomics (and was overjoyed to see “Something Positive” to come up on Languagelog today), and I’m now following a good deal of the pertaining discussion.

This has led me to come across the phrase “trolling the archives” more than once. The most recent example being in a Websnark discussion thread (http://www.websnark.com/archives/2006/0 … l#comments). Presumably they’re homonymous to the poster (larksilver), who may be more familiar with internet trolls than modern fishing practices.

Am I the only one to notice this confusion – and is it an eggcorn?

Google has 30 hits for “trolling archives”:
http://www.google.com/search?hs=3u4&hl= … C3%B8g&lr=

691 for “trolling the archives”:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=da&clie … C3%B8g&lr=

194 for “trolling through the archives”:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=da&clie … C3%B8g&lr=

and 1580/393/1570 hits for the same searches with “troll” rather than “trolling”. The “troll archives” does appear to have a lot a genuine hits, though.

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#2 2006-02-23 20:24:17

Fishbait
Member
From: Brookline, MA
Registered: 2005-12-13
Posts: 38
Website

Re: Troll vs. trawl

It’s lovely but if, as you surmise, it’s a spelling error by a writer for whom “troll” and “trawl” are homophonous, it’s not an egcorn. It’s difficult to imagine the writer supposing that there’s a verb “to troll,” having something to do with trolls.

Unless it’s an apocopation of “patrolling the Internet”? Is that conceivable?

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#3 2006-02-27 14:33:04

Sili
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 2006-02-23
Posts: 13

Re: Troll vs. trawl

Fishbait wrote:

It’s lovely but if, as you surmise, it’s a spelling error by a writer for whom “troll” and “trawl” are homophonous, it’s not an egcorn. It’s difficult to imagine the writer supposing that there’s a verb “to troll,” having something to do with trolls.

Thanks. The new entry on “ad homonym cleared up a few things for me. I’m obviously not a linguist, and English isn’t my first language. And I conciously try to mold my pronunciation after RP, so a lot of these spelling errors baffle me. I just found it odd, that since most people are familiar with internet “trolls”, they’d stop to consider whether “trolling” could be the correct word for sifting through something. Then again, I’m perfectly well aware of the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re”, yet I still seem to be typing phonetically rather than semantically most of the time.

Unless it’s an apocopation of “patrolling the Internet”? Is that conceivable?

Ironically that makes a lot of sense to me, but since there doesn’t appear to be any examples of “patrolling the archives” on Google, it probably isn’t.

Idly, I’ve (so far) only come across “ad homonym” as a pun that I didn’t really get because “Hexle Burr” and “Excalibur” don’t sound alike to me:
http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/0570.htm

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#4 2006-03-02 11:56:37

Brenda M. Shaw
Member
Registered: 2005-12-09
Posts: 15

Re: Troll vs. trawl

I’m not so sure this is incorrect, or if it is, it’s gone mainstream.

If you go fishing in a small boat, you may use a ‘trolling motor’. This is a small electric motor that is very quiet and propels your boat at a slow speed. ‘Trolling’ is a fishing technique in which you let your lure hang in the water while the boat is moving slowly, as opposed to repeatedly casting it out and reeling it back in.

‘Trawling’ is also a fishing term, but it describes a different activity—dragging a large net that catches everything in its way.

‘Trolling motor’ brings up over 500,000 hits on Google, while ‘trawling motor’ only brings up 700. I’m pretty sure the motor is called a ‘trolling motor’, and that the technique using this motor is called ‘trolling’. There’s a possibility of a linguistic connection between ‘trolling’ and ‘trawling’, but they mean different things today.

If these other usages are indeed fishing metaphors, to ‘troll’ through an archive would mean to glide through it and see what catches your interest, while to ‘trawl’ it would mean to read everything you come across. I think ‘troll’ makes more sense with the intended meaning.

It’s unfortunate that on the internet, a ‘troll’ also means someone who slings insults for the sake of getting attention or upsetting people, and ‘to troll’ means to engage in such behaviour.

Last edited by Brenda M. Shaw (2006-03-02 11:57:44)

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#5 2006-03-02 20:40:59

Fishbait
Member
From: Brookline, MA
Registered: 2005-12-13
Posts: 38
Website

Re: Troll vs. trawl

Brenda, I’m sure you’re right. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me—I know what “trolling” is.

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#6 2006-03-05 11:46:20

Sili
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 2006-02-23
Posts: 13

Re: Troll vs. trawl

Thanks for the clarification. I’m not an angler myself, so I’d never heard of “trolling” before, whereas “trawling” is used unchanged in Danish.

I can see how “trolling” with that definition makes sense, but “trawling” better describes my own webcomic reading habits, since I usually swallow them hook, line and sinker (to mess my fishing mixaphors).

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#7 2006-03-08 13:45:12

larksilver
Guest

Re: Troll vs. trawl

I have seen both terms used, and “trolling” just sounded like more fun, to be honest.

Although, having read here of the terms from whence both originated, I think perhaps I used the wrong phrase after all. I’m more of a “read everything I come across” than a “dangle a lure to see what catches my interest” kinda gal.

Wow. I learned something new today, just by doing a google search, looking for a different comment, posted elsewhere. Weird world.

 

#8 2009-11-08 13:28:11

Darkmoon
Member
Registered: 2009-11-08
Posts: 2

Re: Troll vs. trawl

I found this discussion while researching to verify my understanding of the origins of the phrase “Internet troll,” in the effort to discover whether or not it started out with “trawling,” and later became “troll” as an eggcorn. I discovered: 1) the term “eggcorn,” which I had not heard before (now I have a name for what I was researching); 2) that trolling, when used as a verb, means to fish from a boat while towing a line and hook(s); and 3) trawling means to fish from a boat with a net. This is all so interesting that I signed up for an account just to comment on it (assuming that anyone is reading this thread any more, since it is more than three years since the last post). Here’s what interests me about it:

If I understand the definition of “eggcorn” correctly, then “Internet troll” indeed is one, but of an interesting and (going by the examples on the home page) highly unusual type. Y’see, trolling was first used with respect to the Internet as a verb (meaning to fish from a boat with a baited longline) as a metaphor to describe the activity of attempting to disrupt (and thereby vandalize) a forum by posting provocative and inflammatory material to it, in the hope of provoking the participants into overheated emotional responses. The metaphor involved was that the troller was “fishing for a bite.

It is standard practice in English, particularly in US vernacular English, to turn our verbs into nouns, and our nouns into verbs. If the disruptive activity was to be called trolling, then both the provocative messages and the vandals engaged in trolling were called…trolls! The only problem with that strategy is that the word “troll” as a noun already has a well-established meaning: the creatures of Norse mythology. By metaphorical extension, a “troll” (noun) is an anti-social or even sociopathic person who is possessed of an ugly disposition and/or character.

This, then, makes the perfect eggcorn: an “Internet troll” is an ugly, vindictive, narcissistic, sociopathic vandal (the only thing s/he doesn’t do is live under a bridge—and we’re not so sure even of that), who has nothing better to do than to disrupt social intercourse in Internet forums and chat rooms, or engage in other forms of Cyber-Bullying—not necessarily for financial gain, but simply for the sheer Schadenfreude or ‘lulz’. For example, have a look at this New York Times article, Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling.

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#9 2009-11-08 14:48:52

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: Troll vs. trawl

Hi, Darkmoon. Assuming you are not an Internet troll (we have had a few of these on the forum recently), welcome to the forum. Because of the way the forum interface works, posting to an old thread resurrects the thread for regular viewers. Your comments will be seen.

You will find oodles of good eggcorns in our database and our forum discussions. Whether “troll/trawl the Internet” is an eggcorn, though, is an open question. I think that most of the time it probably isn’t one. The metaphorical sense of trawling, doing a generic search for something, was already in widespread use when the Internet went viral in the 1990s, so the extension of this established metaphor to the Internet has probably happened countless times. “Trolling on the Internet” does have, as you note, a specific meaning (lurking about with the hope of making offensive comments), but “trolling the Internet” could also be, and probably is, a natural extension of the fishing sense of “troll,” i.e., running a line behind a slow-moving boat. We troll the Internet to hook some tasteful tidbits of information. Since neither “trawling the Internet” nor “trolling the Internet” would qualify as the established usage, it’s hard to see how one of them could be an acorn and the other its eggcorn. That said, I’m sure that a number of people confuse the two terms, saying “troll” when they mean “trawl” and “trawl” when they mean “troll,” and they do this both with the literal meanings and the metaphorical meanings of the two words. If they happened to confuse the two when the Internet was the object of the action, then the utterance would qualify as an eggcorn.

It is standard practice in English, particularly in US vernacular English, to turn our verbs into nouns, and our nouns into verbs.

Shakespeare might have something to say about whether Brits or Americans are more likely to verb their nouns.

Last edited by kem (2009-11-08 17:38:10)


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#10 2009-11-08 15:23:22

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: Troll vs. trawl

I think Darkmoon was counting as a perfect eggcorn not the troll/trawl alternation, but the switch troll (fishing) v. yields troll (monster) n. Or maybe the more complex derivation troll (fishing) v. yields troll (monster) n. which yields troll (behave like a monster) v. A hidden eggcorn, so maybe not “perfect”, but certainly interesting and entertaining, to my mind.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-11-08 15:28:27)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#11 2009-11-08 16:29:47

David Bird
Eggcornista
From: The Hammer, Ontario
Registered: 2009-07-28
Posts: 1690

Re: Troll vs. trawl

There is a more cultivated though laborious way to search the internet: with a trowel.

Nothing screams massive amounts of STDs like a chick troweling the internet to cheat on her out of town boyfriend.
(http://epicdatingfail.blogspot.com/2009 … ernet.html)

Please tell me you found that picture whilst troweling the internet?
(http://forums.morrissey-solo.com/showth … p?p=723301)

Okay, well… after trowelling the internet for hours trying to find a cheap hotel in London
(http://www.travelmuse.com/see-all.htm?q … xml&page=3)

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#12 2009-11-08 20:44:44

Darkmoon
Member
Registered: 2009-11-08
Posts: 2

Re: Troll vs. trawl

Hi, kem. Thank you for your reply and welcome, and for extending to me the benefit of the doubt. If I am to be a troll, I hope to be regarded as a friendly one, for the discussion I hoped to provoke should be very much to the purpose of the forum, at least as I understand it.

I think Darkmoon was counting as a perfect eggcorn not the troll/trawl alternation, but the switch troll (fishing) v. yields troll (monster) n. Or maybe the more complex derivation troll (fishing) v. yields troll (monster) n. which yields troll (behave like a monster) v.

Thank you for that, David. Yes, that is very close to what I had in mind. To be more precise, troll (fishing—> ‘trolling for suckers’) v. as the acorn, yields troll (mythical monster—> a person who behaves like said monster) n. as the eggcorn—it is the “acorn—> eggcorn” shift in meaning when shifting from the verb to the noun that interests me. While the original posters started with trolling/trawling the Internet for information (as a metaphor for research) and mentioned Internet trolls as a side issue, I switched focus to Internet trolls as my main issue. Apologies for not being more clear about that.

It may surprise all of you to learn that I had not heard trawl/troll used as a metaphor for a search, before. I am, however, very familiar with the somewhat similar metaphor of ‘fishing (for information)’, which denotes a casting about in one’s cross-examination of somebody in the hope of bringing to light some bit of information that the examined party should very much prefer not be discovered. The metaphor is made one of ridicule and derision in the phrase “fishing expedition,” as in, for example, the attorney who has not adequately researched a case, and so engages in a fishing expedition with a witness in the witness box, in the midst of a trial. Though I have not researched it, I strongly suspect that it is this metaphor that provides the name to the Internet confidence trick known as “phishing.”

With that, I believe I have managed to draw yet another red herring across the trail of this discussion. There, now. That should make enough angling-derived metaphors to satisfy the saltiest of old salts.

Shakespeare might have something to say about whether Brits or Americans are more likely to verb their nouns.

That seems somewhat doubtful, for, if Shakespeare did have something to say, why then, he has already said it. :D

There is a more cultivated though laborious way to search the internet: with a trowel.

That impresses me as the preferable method, since use of a garden trowel connotes an earthiness that brings a sense of wholesomeness. The other method has a certain something about it that is quite distinctly… erm… fishy…

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