Eggcorn Forum

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?

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)

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).

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.

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)

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…