Trolls and Trolling

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon. This is Harry from Falls Church, Virginia.

Hi, Harry. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’ve been interested in the word troll. You know, it’s had various meanings. And, you know, I initially thought of it as a fishing term. And then Tolkien and the hobbits turned them into people or mythological figures. And now in the last year or two, you know, it’s entered the political world. In fact, recently the Speaker of the House used the word trolling in a sentence describing some of our politicians. It’s sort of mushy, and I don’t know really how this is happening.

Okay, okay, this is good. You’ve really hit some nice mile markers on the progress and the interrelationships of the different kind of trolls that we have here. Let me see if I can add a few more mile markers to kind of this map that you’ve got for a troll.

First, the Tolkieness troll is ancient. It goes back to at least Old Norse in a variety of different forms, referring to some mythological creature, often ugly, often vaguely magical, often a thing that you didn’t want to encounter. Think of the trolls in like, is it Billy Goat Gruff where there was a troll under the bridge?

Under the bridge, yes. So the troll goes way back. But later, and it’s a separate instance of it, and it has nothing to do with the mythological creature, the French came up with a troll meaning to cast about or to kind of scan for something or to slowly look for a thing. And we borrowed that troll into English, and we use it primarily, or did, in fishing, where you dangle bait over the side, and your boat slowly goes down the stream or across the lake, and you try to attract fish to the slowly moving bait and you bring them and that’s trolling.

And so we fast forward to the internet. Very early on in the history of the internet is this big social phenomenon. People started doing what we now call trolling, which is saying outrageous things, sometimes that they didn’t believe in order just to get a rise out of other people, to get their goat, so to speak, or just to bust their chops. And this trolling comes specifically from the fishing kind of trolling, which is you throw something outrageous out there on the internet and see who bites.

Maybe it’s going to be a newbie who doesn’t know that you’re a big jokester. Maybe it’s going to be somebody on the other side of the political spectrum who you just know is going to be frothing at the mouth, this thing that you’ve said that you don’t even really believe in. But obviously people know about the mythological trolls, so very soon, people who do trolling, which comes from fishing, were called trolls with the idea that they were ugly, undesirable beasts that were causing all this mayhem and you didn’t really want them around.

How does that sound?

Wow.

Yeah, right? Language is weird, man. Language borrows. Words don’t stay themselves. They transform. They modify. And when we have similar words, a lot of times those meanings intersect and we borrow from both streams in order to make a new stream.

Well, that is absolutely fascinating, and I recognize that language is not static, but I didn’t expect this. Yeah, so the Internet trolling where you just say outrageous or dumb things on purpose in order to irritate or aggravate other people dates to at least the early 1990s. A lot of times people will credit the news group Alt Folklore Urban, but I’ve actually found it earlier than it was ever mentioned in that news group and other places in Usenet, in the news groups.

Well, it’s on cable TV with some regularity these days. Well, it’s mainstream now. I’m not surprised that you heard it on cable news or see it in the newspaper. It’s utterly mainstream because the Internet is mainstream. And we’ve been an Internet society for going on 30 years now.

Right. And as you said, the Speaker of the House used the term.

Right. It’s striking to me that it goes from the fishing trolling idea but also incorporates the creepy guy under the bridge. Because that’s what I picture when I think of internet trolls. I think of somebody coming out from the dark nether regions.

Well, there’s this interval period there where, and I think this is important, Harry, where the phishing trolling first became figurative and non-phishing related in other ways before it arrived to the internet idea of trolling. So you can see people trolling for dates, like going to the mall and trolling for trouble or trolling for information.

And there’s another kind of correspondence here that people often bring up, which is trolling, T-R-A-W-L, which is another kind of fishing where you throw out a wide net and see what comes in. And so that further kind of pollutes our understanding of the origins of this term. But fortunately, this one has been fairly well researched. I find some new things every time I look into it because new things are digitized constantly. And we have a pretty firm understanding of where this comes from now.

Well, thank you very much.

Harry, yeah, thanks so much for calling. Appreciate it. Call us again sometime. I love your show. Take care.

Thank you very much. Take care now. Thanks. Bye-bye.

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