Shameless Plug

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I found no obvious connection between trawl and troll, and no connection to trail seems to exist. Trawl is related to tract (as in traction, tractor) and derives directly from Latin "tragula"; sledge or dragnet. I guess tragula is cognate to German tragen, to carry or wear.

Troll has a long history through at least Middle English, giving rise to trolley and trollop as well meaning fishing with lines from a moving boat. The basic meaning is turn or revolve. Side meanings were roll, wander, drag about, ramble, and surprisingly, to circulate drinks. From that last, it also means the singing if successive parts of a drinking song. Now that I've been reminded, I have heard "trolling" used to mean loud drunken reveling/caroling.

Respectfully submitted; youts etc.,

Jerry

Dear B, I hesitated before replying because I wondered whether you were trolling when you used 'principal.' Now, it is not nice to correct spelling mistakes in postings, but being prescriptive, I thought that I should bring this error to your attention in accordance with the principle: 'He who lives by the (s)word shall die by the (s)word."

Talking about word usage, Trolling is a hot topic in some of the other threads. I always thought that Trolls were monsters that lived under bridges in Scandinavia and who gobbled up travelers. Trawling is the process of dragging a net through the sea to catch fish, although 'Trolling' is also used. It seems to me that a person who engages in trawling or trolling should be a Trawler or a Troller, and not a Troll.

Regards, John

Jerry beat me to it. I was going to point out that trolling is fishing with a line pulled by a moving boat, trawling is fishing with a net pulled by a moving boat. The etymology is probably interesting.

In any case, the fishing and malicious Norwegian troll connections are both suitably fit descriptions for the sorts of usenet trolls that we're all too familiar with.

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms, Intel Corp. My opinions may not be Intel's opinions.

It was one of those situations that just boggles the mind. We had a newly-minted BSEE give one of the technicians a rather "interesting" design...

There was a battery-operated box in one room that had a HC TTL output.

There was a battery-operated box in another room with a HC TTL input.

There was two hundred feet of 12AWG (!) wire connecting the two.

There was NO ground return.

The tech was reporting a 60Hz square wave & no signal at the input.

He knew about ground returns, but I had a standing order to all techs to get the design engineer's OK before correcting even obvious errors, and he was having trouble getting the engineer to agree to any change.

When I went to talk to the engineer, I figured that this was just a case of an assumption that drawing the little ground symbol somehow connects all grounds together - a fairly normal error for someone just out of college.

Instead I found that this EE had never learned the concept of electricity going in a circle! The usual switch/battery/lamp drawing on the whiteboard contained new knowledge for this EE.

This was no dummy, either; the EE could run rings around me when it came to doing advanced math and physics. It's just that the school never taught the basics and didn't require knowledge of basic electricity to graduate.

As Dave Barry often says, I am not making this stuff up.

Wordplay is the peak of humor.

I believe that "trolling" is dragging a lure or baited hook through the water to catch fish. A net catches wahtever is there. A hook only catches those who take the bait.

I had always assumed that the reason for this was twofold: (a) the early denizens of usenet were by-and-large computer geeks, or at least science geeks who had a greater affinity with fantasy of the D&D variety than with fishing, and (b) once the behaviour pattern is understood (by all) you can get away with using the (incorrect) term as a direct slur: much more satisfying in the heat of a flame fest.

Of course, I'm just an engineer (who's been using Usenet since the days that it was carried by uucp), not a linguist. I may very well not know what I'm talking about. :-)

Cheeers,

Takes a cunning linguist for that.

- YD.

The Norwegian word "tralle" means either "trolley"/"small wagon" (noun) or "hum"/"sing quietly to oneself" (verb). I don't know if there is any etymological connections between the different forms.

There is a very similar Norwegian word, "talje", that means "tackle" as in "block and tackle". The meaning transfers to most situations where a rope is supported by a rolling wheel.

Another very similar "word" is "trallala" as one sings when one doesn't know or remember the words of a song. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the origins of the verb "å tralle" (hum/sing quitely) above.

Rune

Probably from "troll, loll, loll" sort of thing when they are too drunk to remember the words, or are traditional English folk singers who always forget the words drunk or sober.

That's very Derbyshire, especially the hardening of the th in 'youth'. You get octogenarians calling each other 'youth' here- the land of enternal youth?

Paul Burke

My recollection is that "trolling" is specifically when using a spinning lure, which would fit with "The basic meaning is turn or revolve" noted by Jerry above.

Regards Ian

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"Block" is at least the pulley housing. "Tackle" may be just the rope, or it may mean rope, pulley, and axle. "Tackle" is also a synonym for "gear", meaning equipment. More to look up!

Jerry

And a bilingual pun is the pinnacle of wordplay.

Cheers Terry

Andrew, After reading the other postings in this thread I now know that trolling means drawing a bait through the water to atract a specific type of fish. This is an excellent description of the process that is carried out by Newsgroup trolls (and which livens up things from time to time) so 'Trolling' it is! As to WHY a person who trolls is called a Troller, I do like your explanation. It would have seemed natural to decide that a Troll was a creature who trolled, just as it was natural to make WATFIV the successor to WATFOR. The computer community loves puns and word-plays!

Regards, John

Jerry Avins to stdout:

In Portuguese, 'inflammable' would mean 'not flammable' ('in'/'im' prefix

----> 'not' as in 'impossible' == 'not possible' or 'incapable' == 'not capable').

Yet, we still use 'inflammable' (exact translation for "inflamÁvel")

While you are at it, the word "trille" means "roll" while the word "trylle" means "perform 'magic' tricks", as you can see illusionists do on circus etc. The more 'real' form of magic, like whitchcraft, is known as either "trolleri", "magics of troll", or "trollskap", "workings of trolls". These are magic tricks with a sinister twist to them. "Trollskap" also applies to pranks and practical jokes with a not all benign emphasis. "Troll" as a prefix would also serve to denote an abnormly large or particularly maliscious/badly behaved variation of some object or creature.

So I guess anyone who wants to untangle the etymolgical web with basis in the word "troll" would be busy for a couple of days. From this thread I find the following similar words from English and Norwegian:

Talje [Norw] (n) - rolling wheel for ropes to run on Trallala [Norw] (?) - common 'lyrics' of song when humming Tralle [Norw] (v) - sing, hum Tralle [Norw] (n) - small wagon Trawl [Eng] (v) - fish by dragging a net Trille [Norw] (v) - roll Trille [Norw] (n) - small wagon Troll [Norw] (n) - mythological creature Troll [Eng] (v) - fish with lure Troll(?) [Eng] (v) - sing loudly in drunken state Troll(?) [Eng] (v) - ramble, talk/sing incoherently(?) Troll(?) [Eng] (v) - roll Trolle [Norw] (v) - perform black magic Trolleri [Norw] (n) - blak magic Trolley [Eng] (n) - small wagon Trollskap [Norw] (n) - prank, practical joke with a 'bad' twist Trylle [Norw] (v) - perform illusions or showtime 'magic' (ref Houdini, Copperfield) Tråle [Norw] (v) - fish by dragging a net

The English and Norwegian languages are both based in the norse common languages of some 1000 - 1200 years ago, so it would come as no surprise if some of these words share common roots and have evolved in different ways in the two languages.

Rune