Jonathon Owen, the linguist/editor who blogs at Arrant Pedantry (“Examining language rules and where they come from”) and whose post on “as such” I quoted with fervent approval in May, has another winner, I Am Begging You to Learn How Dictionaries Work:
It’s a phenomenon as predictable as the tides: a dictionary adds new words or definitions, and then people grouse about those changes, either because they don’t like the new words and think that the dictionary is declaring them acceptable, or because they personally have never heard of those words before and therefore don’t see why they should be included. They often blend in grumpiness about the language supposedly declining or about kids these days. In both cases, of course, the real problem is that readers just don’t understand how dictionaries work.
Take this recent example from Maura Hohman at NBCLX, a site dedicated to “thought-provoking content” “about tech, the environment, politics, community, social issues, and current events.” It takes the familiar kids-these-days trope and gives it an unusual spin: the author is only thirty, but she feels old because she doesn’t recognize a few of the 455 words recently added to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. She starts off by calling herself an elder millennial, which I found cute as a millennial who just turned forty. I also found it odd from someone complaining about definitions. Definitions vary, of course, but elder or geriatric millennials are generally considered to have been born somewhere between something like 1980 and 1985 or 1981 and 1988. Even by the more generous definition, Hohman misses the cutoff by three years. Nevertheless, she says it was “a gut punch” to realize that she didn’t know a lot of these new words, which she calls “wrinkle-inducing additions.”
The first word she complains about, zero-day, means “of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”. Weirdly, though, the definition she gives appears to be for a noun, not the adjective that Merriam-Webster enters. At any rate, Hohman imagines that this is a term used by children and that her unfamiliarity with it makes her old, when really it just means she doesn’t read much about device security. And that’s fine! But if she ever reads an article that mentions a zero-day vulnerability, now she’ll be able to look up that phrase in Merriam-Webster.
He goes on to discuss blank check company (a term I, like Owen, was unfamiliar with), deplatform, oobleck, and teraflop in equally lively and convincing style, concluding:
Of course, the real problem with all of these complaints has nothing to do with Hohman’s age or even the fact that she wasn’t familiar with some of the new words in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary; it’s that she seems to think that if she doesn’t know all of these newly entered words, then the dictionary isn’t for her anymore. But that’s silly. A dictionary that contained only the words you already know wouldn’t be a very useful dictionary, would it?
When I was a kid, I’d often come across an unfamiliar word and ask my parents what it meant. Their answer was almost always the same: “Look it up.” So I’d pull out the big two-volume World Book Dictionary that came with our encyclopedia set, and I’d look it up. I learned a lot of words doing that. There will always be words that you’re not familiar with, either because they’re not from your generation or from your region, because they’re technical or obscure, or because you simply haven’t run across them before, which means that there will always be opportunities to learn something new in a dictionary. Because that’s the real job of a dictionary—not to wrinkle your face but to wrinkle your brain.
I love seeing the truth laid out so wittily and eloquently.
It should be no surprise that some people are unfamiliar with blank check company, because the more common term, seen in the financial and even general press daily, is special purpose acquisition company, often seen as SPAC.
“ How a SPAC Works
SPACs are generally formed by investors or sponsors with expertise in a particular industry or business sector, to pursue deals in that area. In creating a SPAC, the founders sometimes have at least one acquisition target in mind, but they don’t identify that target to avoid extensive disclosures during the IPO process. (This is why they are called “blank check companies.” IPO investors typically have no idea about the company in which they will ultimately be investing). SPACs seek underwriters and institutional investors before offering shares to the public.”
source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp
Here’s an example from this morning’s news:
“ Panera Bread is preparing to go public again through an initial public offering.
The sandwich chain also announced Tuesday it has secured an investment from Danny Meyer’s special purpose acquisition company, USHG Acquisition Corp. Shares of the SPAC climbed 9% in early trading on the news.
Meyer said he plans to invest in Panera once it’s public personally and through his SPAC. Special purpose acquisition companies have no assets but can use the proceeds from an IPO, combined with bank financing, to buy and take privately held consumer companies public. The investment in Panera is an unusual deal for a SPAC, which will exchange its shares for the sandwich chain’s stock and survive the merger with Panera’s subsidiary Rye Merger, according to regulatory filings.”
source: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/11/09/panera-bread-announces-spac-investment-to-go-public-through-an-ipo.html
Sadly, I’m equally unfamiliar with SPAC…
SPAC I knew, but not “blank check company”. As I read quite a bit on Finance for my job, that makes me assume the latter is informal jargon.
Thank you for sharing and for the nice words, Languagehat!
I knew special purpose acquisition company and blank-check company, and I agree the first sounds more normal. However, while I had probably seen the acronym before in discussions of special purpose acquisition companies, I would not have recognized “SPAC.”
The other words all sound very ordinary to me. (I remember reading about the anticipation for the eventual arrival of teraflop supercomputers back in the 1980s.) The more recent sense of oobleck is something I personally dislike, however, because the non-Newtonian (compare thixotropic) water-corn starch mixture, with viscosity depending on applied shear, bears very little resemblance to the green, extraordinarily sticky substance in Bartholomew and the Oobleck. (I was a big fan of that book as a young child, although as an adult, I strongly prefer some of Dr. Seuss’s other stories, including The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and the recently maligned Scrambled Eggs Super.) Oobleck was also the term my family used when I was growing up for any (as it is in the book) unusual form of precipitation.
Our francophone daughter taught herself about the importance of dictionaries when she was about five. She had an illustrated children’s dictionary that she loved and took everywhere, for example to read while sitting on the toilet. In her case it was her non-francophone parents who needed to be trained to use the dictionary. She would pull out our bigger dictionary whenever she thought we needed to look up a word.
I vaguely feel like I had probably already heard “blank check company” way back in the ’90’s, and indeed the date of first attestation given is 1987. I think of “blind pool” as an older name for approximately the same sort of venture, although that label is probably more likely to be used by regulators claiming they have not complied with some regulation or other than by promoters trying to get people to invest money in them.
In the U.S., pace Hans, “blank check company” is not (merely) “informal” jargon but “formal” technical jargon defined and used in an SEC regulation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/230.419
For an early instance of the concept one may consider what wikipedia (under “South Sea Bubble”) calls ‘One famous apocryphal story … of a company that went public in 1720 as “a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”‘
In the U.S., pace Hans, “blank check company” is not (merely) “informal” jargon but “formal” technical jargon defined and used in an SEC regulation
Good to know! I just never came across that term before, although SPACs have become quite the rage in the last couple of years.
@Brett, I think they do not/did not discuss physics of viscosity in Russian school, or did so without spectacular demonstrations. I also think it was absent from folklore and popular sceince books like those by Perelman.
I can not be sure, because it could be just my school or I could have forgotten.
Wikipedia also mentions “silly putty” or “handgum”, a toy. We did not have it in USSR too. In around 2009 several of my younger friends (they were ~25 then) got it as a birthday gift, within one year. Many of their virthday gifts were various scientific toys, so maybe a retailer of those began selling it, or maybe it is just when it became popular among people-who-discuss-such-things. As it was new for my freinds, I assume it is not just me and we did not have this toy before, or it was not fashionable.
I read about it, watched a few videos, some of them called the water-starch suspension “oobleck” and I found the word useless. Dr. Seuss is another thing that was absent in USSR, the reference was unfamiliar and I did not like the word as a “proper” name to call what is just water and starch. So I tried to forget it.
@drasvi: Silly Putty is a classic American toy, inducted in 2001 into the Toy Hall of Fame.* (In contrast, I have never heard of “handgum” before. The name in apparently out there on the Web, but it does not appear to be very common, and I’m not sure if it is technically a brand name or not.) Silly Putty is an inexpensive (cheap enough to be occasionally given out at Halloween, in addition to candy) gummy stuff that traditionally comes in plastic eggs. Among its nice features are that in spite of its flexibility, it is relatively dry to the touch and doesn’t leave a residue behind after you handle it. A traditional trick you can work with it is to pick up newsprint; press a blob of it lightly against a newspaper, and a (mirrored) version of the writing gets picked up on the surface of the Silly Putty glob.
* As the Toy Hall of Fame link notes, Silly Putty was one of many substances (along with chicle, various plastics, and others) developed or studied as as possible rubber substitutes before, during, and after the Second World War.
Yes, I had Silly Putty as a child in the ’50s.
Tangentially related to “zero day”: dictionaries distinguish between “to troll” (fishing method); that term has been used for internet activity for at least three decades now; the normal noun as it comes to fishing is a “troller”, and that was also the noun used for the internet equivalent; but a bit after the turn of the century it got contracted to “troll”, which is a homonym of the mythological creature, which I guest would be related to “thrall”?
I though people were aware of the difference, but I watched an episode of What We Do in the Shadows, and the writers didn’t seem to realize that these were homonyms and not the same word and had an internet “troll” turn out to be a literal mythological “troll” in one episode.
They don’t seem to be etymologically related. I think the first is related to “trawler”, as in the type of fishing ship. Or that might have been the joke?
I think you’re looking at it with too narrow a linguistic focus (nerdview, if you will). The moment “troller” was contracted to “troll” it was inevitable that everyone encountering the term fresh would assume it was the mythological creature, so there is no point trying to untangle the etymological threads.
Yeah, but after people started visualizing it as a mythological creature rather than as a malignant/irresponsible fisherman, my mental picture of what a “troll” is started gradually diverging with what people who started using the internet later. My first exposure to the term usually involved a US Southern fisherman with a baseball cap, a fishing rod, and malignant smirk to the camera. That was the iconic “troller” in the ’90.
It was a starghtforward metaphor, while mythological trolls, they don’t seem to have anything to do with the concept of internet trolling, maybe except ex post facto.
How many people have ever heard of the fishing method?
I’ve never lived in an English-speaking country, so I may not be representative, but I learned of the fishing method only after I’d been battling trolls for fifteen years, and precisely in a discussion of the latter’s etymology.
(Until around that time or not long before, I had also only heard of Scandinavian-type trolls that live in the mountains, not English-type trolls that live under bridges. Knowing very little even about the former, I guessed maybe they were known for trolling people, i.e. annoying them for shits & giggles.)
I had heard (well, read) of trawlers and trawling much earlier, but it didn’t occur to me to connect that to trolling.
How many people have ever heard of the fishing method?
Exactly. That is very specialized knowledge, whereas most people know about the mythological creature (in whatever form).
Well, you learn something every day. I had always assumed the internet troll was a descendant of the mythical troll. Then again, I had never heard of the fishing sense of troll growing up in England. I knew about trawling and seining, but didn’t encounter trolling as a fishing method until some time after I had moved to the US. Is it wholly or mainly an American term?
Some forty years ago I was at a friend’s house when he facetiously described a social event I had recently attended in connection with my work as a ‘librarians’ orgy’. His young son asked what an orgy was; receiving no reply, he immediately fetched the dictionary. That boy is now a head teacher.
Until around that time or not long before, I had also only heard of Scandinavian-type trolls that live in the mountains, not English-type trolls that live under bridges. Knowing very little even about the former, I guessed maybe they were known for trolling people, i.e. annoying them for shits & giggles.
This was basically my impression as well.
(Though from what little I’ve heard of the under-bridge variety, “annoying [people] for shits & giggles” sounded fairly appropriate.)
I think my first encounter with the name of the fishing method was (probably ca. 2009, so not long after I learned of internet trolls) in a list of false cognates, which mentioned that “trolling” as in the fishing method was in fact unrelated to “trawling”. I don’t think it gave any specific alternate etymology for either.
It took several more years before I connected trawling to Russian траулер; at the time I read the false cognates list, both of the fishing method names were unfamiliar to me.
Wikipedia also mentions “silly putty” or “handgum”, a toy. We did not have it in USSR too.
My previous encounters with the term “silly putty” had led me to mentally associate it with пластилин (“plasticine” in English), a kind of modelling clay and (AFAIK) a common Soviet playing item. Of course it’s not quite the same thing (though it probably occupied a similar niche as toys go), and in particular does not appear to be particularly non-Newtonian.
I’ve never heard of “handgum” before either; Russian Wikipedia translates literally, жвачка для рук, a term that sounds, somehow, even more unfamiliar. Without looking it up, my guess would be that it’s actually a generic term for whatever Silly Putty is a brand of, and consequently almost unused because approximately everyone just calls it “silly putty”.
I’ve seen (and participated in) an experiment with the water-starch mixture (in Russian), but I forgot what the Russian name used for the substance was. (Though it definitely wasn’t “oobleck”, which I would have found problematic to spell in Russian.)
I don’t read a lot of Dr. Seuss and was unfamiliar with that particular story, so this sense of “oobleck” was actually the first I encountered. It felt like an appropriate onomatopoeia, though, like “yeet”.
EDIT:
seining
…I think that’s my first encounter with that word. I knew that there was a fishing ship type known as сейнер but I never wondered why it was named that.
Living for several years near the Canadian West Coast, I learned to differentiate the verbs to trolli and to trawl, and similarly the boat names troller and trawler, but I was not close enough to know which was which.
m-l, do you have any thoughts on fish?
Also on the other side of the Iron Curtain! Indeed not a fluid, Newtonian or otherwise.
30 years ago there were also slightly sticky green balls of what was just called “slime” (Schleim); a vaguely plastic-like and somewhat jelly-like material that I don’t remember well (I never owned any).
I knew “troll” as a fishing method from before there were intertubes. It’s certainly used in the UK.
I always presumed that internet trolls were named for the sort that lived under bridges, though. Still, the derivation from fishing makes a lot more more sense now that it’s been pointed out.
I am not convinced that troller was ever actually a predominant form. The basically compositional expression, “trolling for newbies,” is only attested on Usenet back to 1992—which is not long before those newbies came to dominate the Internet. (Thanks to AOL, the Eternal September began in fall 1993.) By summer 1994, the most commonly used forms on the parts of Usenet I had started to frequent* were the pair trolling and troll.
* The fact that the troll is an iconic monster (something every English speaker has heard of), unlike trolling (knowledge of which is largely limited to people with experience in fishing), certainly had a key effect on the perception of the noun troll as the basic form. However, the Usenet where I was a regular in the 1990s were mostly filled with Dungeons & Dragons players, and that had a significant effect on how trolls were handled and treated in that particular corner of the Internet. D & D trolls (as well as paladins) are taken from Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, and their particular claim to fame is their rapid regeneration. Unless their flesh is physically destroyed (by fire, acid, or disintegration magic), their wounds will close and their bodies reassembled themselves. Thus, the D & D players, the natural response to the appearance of a troll was to reply with a massive flame (in the Internet sense).** It was only a few years later that I learned that the standard recommended response to obnoxious Internet trolls was not to unload on them with prolix verbal attacks but to ignore them (in the hope that a troll, not having gotten a rise out of anybody, would lose interest and move on); this is normally described as, “Do not feed the troll,” which still interprets the troll as a monster (sometimes with additional jokes about the trolls being basement dwellers, analogized to the tradition of trolls living under bridges) but not as one specifically vulnerable to flames.
** This sense of flame is another reinterpretation. Originally, it was just an intensifier, but it was later humorously reinterpreted as a verb.
Dictionaries don’t always tell young people what they want to know. In the1950s books like Boldness be my Friend about escaping from Prisoner-of-War Camps were all the rage in England. In one such book I read as a little lad that taking refuge in a brothel was not recommended, as that was the first place the Gestapo would look. Not knowing what a brothel was (a sort of hotel, I thought) I got out my little dictionary and found that it meant a “house of prostitution”. I didn’t feel much the wiser, as the dictionary was just as vague about what “prostitution” meant. A few days later I was at an open-air swimming pool with a picnic area with my sisters and a boy of about 16. “What’s prostitution?” I asked, in a voice loud enough for the people around to hear. My sister and the boy were very embarrassed, and the best answer I got was that a brothel was a place people went to do things.
I remember well how I noticed the word first. I was i the 3d grade, my classmate was drawing a self-made (all such games were self-made, yet popular among kids) monopoly-style game, another classmate was playing it. Kids were watching. When I approached them, the player had just landed on a field with a prostitute (pictured), which meant that unless he had bought a condom a few fields earlier (he had not), he was in trouble.
But I did not even know what is sex:-/ Now thinking about this… Kids making manuals for STD-prevention… on their own… when adults are not watching. Das ist fantastisch. (30 years ago this Russian idiom referred to German porn, but I never watched it too)
Has this ever worked, BTW? In my experience, if you don’t give a troll or more generally a bully your attention, they come and take it.
@dm
I think this is more complicated and relates to dynamics of dominance and submission, acceptance and rejection within a group, as well as to the troll’s motive. So the “ignore troll” strategy works if the troll’s motive is to provoke a reaction (negative or positive does not matter: the troll may then go off to find a more easily provoked victim).The “shout troll down” strategy works if the troll’s motive is to gain recognition or status in a group and the person doing the “shouting down” is able to exert dominance on the troll successfuly (the troll may then moderate their behaviour to what is acceptable).
I remember once I and my friend improvised a family scandal in a shop. We actually match the definition of trolls: we both enjoyed the process. (later we married or almost so… it is complicated.)
Ibsen
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/science-nomad/peer-gynt-normal-troll-is-not-a-problem-but-each-of-us-turning-into-a-boyg-is/
thought seriously and a lot about trolls. Here he is from a Gujarati viewpoint.
As an elder millenial I remember seeing “0day warez” advertised on IRC (internet relay chat, like Slack but with a $0b valuation) as a young teenager.
My usual tactic with insistent trolls is to reply:
Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone.
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
If my father had published the only translation of Peer Gynt into Gujerati, I too would have being trying to find a pretext to mention this in an article for years. I mean, cool!
SPACs were introduced to me just a few days ago, because Donald Trump announced one for the formation of his new social media platform.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/donald-trump-spac-truth-social/
Note that the Washington Post decided that SPACs were rare/unusual enough that the same article that describes DJTs most recent
griftbusiness is mostly about explaining what a SPAC is.The Daily Kos states explicitly that in this case, at least, it is absolutely a scam. Money flows towards DJT regardless of whether the purported site goes live for real.
Real [old] Nerds know of “oobleck” and “teraflop” from the Jargon File (spelled “ooblick” there, but noting the original Seussian spelling) in the first case, and as part of Teraflop club in the second. Although I’m pretty sure I saw {metric prefix}flop in the context of supercomputing before I read it there, probably in BYTE or similar old-school computing magazine/journal.
However, I have also seen “oobleck”, with a recipe, at a children’s museum for the kids to make and play with, as recently as 2018 or 2019. They also thoughtfully included smocks for the kids to wear.
I note that the Jargon File definition for “ooblick” has “grokked in fullness”, and a definition for grok.
Real Nerds also know that the “proper” name of Silly Putty is Dow Corning 3179 Dilatant Compound. (Product Sheet PDF).
I have – often.
Me, being an “Elderly milllenial” by Jonathon Owen’s definition, find “{prefix}flops” a term mostly older people use in practice, but one I would default to also in certain situations, which is both helpful and unhelpful depending on the computing architecture.
EDIT: It’s usually petaFLOPS that get talked about these days, though. Not teraFLOPS.
The Daily Kos states explicitly that in this case, at least, it is absolutely a scam. Money flows towards DJT regardless of whether the purported site goes live for real.
I wouldn’t have expected anything else.
@V: Yeah, thanks to Moore’s Law, there should be a relatively constant advance through the metric prefixes as time passes. I certainly hear mostly about petaflops these days. So maybe the dictionaries are going to be adding new –flop compounds at an equally constant rate, just fifteen to twenty years after the peak relevance of each term.
I won’t argue with Mr Shukla’s three waves of troll into English, except that surely the Billygoats Gruff are more important than Peer Gynt for the common understanding of the concept.
The Bøyg is a snake-like creature, probably a descendent of the old Germanic mythological worms (most prominently Miðgarðsormr and Fáfnir*), in the same way as the trolls are descended from the jotuns. Its name means the Bend or the Turn, and it doesn’t do much except being an ever-moving obstacle for travellers. In Ibsen’s Peer Gynt it turns into the elusive resistance to our own attempts to change or move on.
* I haven’t thought of it before, but Fáfnir of Fáðmir might well be fathomer or grasper. That could be because he’s a hoarder, but it could also be because he forms a loop. Or both – a loop from which nothing escapes.
In Ibsen’s Peer Gynt it turns into the elusive resistance to our own attempts to change or move on.
Faust was just grumpy.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor,
und bin so klug als wie zuvor!
(als wie makes prescriptivists blow their gaskets, BTW.)
@Trond Engen: I think fathomer/grasper/embracer is indeed the usual etymology proposed for Fafnir’s name.
My favorite illustrations of Fafnir are the ones by Arthur Rackham, although I don’t particularly care for the way he drew Siegfried, Wotan, or Brünnhilde (whom he tends to depict with her breasts hanging out). Unfortunately, the copy of the opera translation that was scanned for the Internet Archive has had several of Rackham’s illustration plates torn out—although you can find them online by searching for their captions. A Google image search for “Fafnir” also turns up a number of other illustrations that are clearly heavily influenced by Rackham, alongside many depictions of more conventional winged western-style dragons.
Bøyg
Just noticed the similarity:
bʰewgʰ-
Proto-Indo-European
Root
*bʰewgʰ-[1][2]
1. to bend
2. curve, arch
bükmek
Turkish
Etymology
From Ottoman Turkish بوكمك,[1] from Proto-Turkic *bük- (“to bow, curve, bend”).[2] Compare Azerbaijani bükmək.
Verb
bükmek (third-person singular simple present büker)
1. To bend
2. To curve
3. To entwist
4. To fold
5. To inflect
One of those English terms that I’ve only ever encountered / looked up as a gloss for etymological data (though the Finnish standard equivalent, nuotta, is still common enough in folk songs and the like).
Over here we have also ended up with a delightful translation of troll as rölli, primarily known as the name of a 80s–90s childrens’ show character who is sort of inspired by Scandinavian trolls but more of an unkempt forest goblin prankster.
I would assume more people know about a method of fishing than do about a mythological creature, in an average society.
Our trolls can be unkempt pranksters too. Trollunger or småtroll is common for children, usually implying delightfully unruly. I believe the default size of trolls grew to “giant” in the 19th century, with Kittilsen’s most striking illustrations. Other folktale trolls are very much man-size.
I’d expect few people to know about a specialized deep-sea fishing method. Mythology is much more broadly shared.
Exactly.
As fishing methods go, trawling is more of a characteristically deep-water (and thus perhaps deep-sea) one than trolling, which is just as suitable for use on smallish lakes as in salt water, shallow or deep. I think I was first introduced to trolling when I was perhaps six or seven years old, on a family vacation on some lake in Canada. I don’t think of it as particularly arcane or specialized knowledge, although perhaps fishing and hunting are both more mainstream recreational hobbies in the U.S. than in Europe? Relatedly, trawling is more of a commercial-fisherman technique than trolling, because it tends to get you a much higher volume of fish but without much of a “sporting” element.
I don’t think of it as particularly arcane or specialized knowledge
That’s how we all feel about our own knowledge. I’m pretty sure it is in fact arcane in the general population.
But fishing for recreation has long been a widespread pastime in the Normal-American speech community, and thus gives rise to stock phrases and metaphors (e.g. “hook line and sinker”) widely understood by people who have never personally gone fishing. Similarly, metaphors in AmEng drawn from baseball/football/hockey/etc are not arcane simply because some members of socially marginal groups like intellectuals and Europeans might find them puzzling. Even the weirdo early ’90’s online nerds Brett was referring to upthread were apparently sufficiently aware of Normal-American behavior and stereotypes to get this one.
Hunting is (except I don’t know about, like, Finland). Fishing is very popular in Europe – but only with lines, sitting by a lake or river all morning.
Admittedly, the metaphorical meaning of not (even) in the same ballpark is perfectly clear even if you have no clue that a baseball stadium is called a ballpark. I used this phrase years before I first read of that.
But fishing for recreation has long been a widespread pastime in the Normal-American speech community
Not sure what you mean by “widespread,” but I’ve never known anyone who fished for recreation. I’m aware that it’s a thing, but there are a lot more urbanites than rural folk in the US.
I’m pretty sure that you are mistaken: that if you take to interviewing the people you know, you’ll find that many of them have fished for recreation.
If that’s not so, then it’s an important cultural development and one I should know about.
I probably learned about trawling and seining in geography class or some such at grammar school, because deep sea commercial fishing was one of those activities that Made Britain Great. Or maybe we were in one of those silly cod wars with Iceland at the time and had to be reminded of our heritage.
As for fishing as a pastime, I grew up in a small town on the Thames and dutifully spent summer afternoons sitting on the bank with a cheap fishing rod. A profoundly dull thing to do, it struck me then and now.
Then when I moved to the US I first lived in small town on the Fox River in Illinois and would see men (invariably men, as I recall) row a boat out into the middle of the river, set up a couple of fishing rods, and drink beer all afternoon. I don’t think catching fish was an important goal.
I’m pretty sure that you are mistaken: that if you take to interviewing the people you know, you’ll find that many of them have fished for recreation.
I’m pretty sure I’m not; I know one guy who might conceivably have fished for recreation, since he likes hiking in the outdoors, but I doubt it. I’d ask him, but he’s going through some serious medical stuff and I’m not going to bother him with it. In any case, I’m pretty sure you’re generalizing from your own experience. Urbanites, by and large, are not fishermen, though of course there are exceptions. Yes, you can see people fishing in NYC’s rivers, but NYC has eight million people.
And of course having spent a certain amount of time dangling a line in the water is no guarantee you’ll be familiar with a specialized term like “trolling.”
Ah, but who is more provincial than the urbanite who fancies himself cosmopolitan? My own perspective is probably skewed by the notion that fishing and its vocabulary are notably *less* arcane than quite a lot of the niche interests I have devoted my life to learning about (and which I would not expect the average person’s lexicon to include the lexemes for). FWIW I grew up in a completely non-rural suburban milieu, where I suppose fishing was less popular than in echt-rural areas but still a perfectly mainstream pursuit. I suppose there might be reasonable grounds to expect regional variation in AmEng lexical knowledge, however. How likely people are to fish from a boat versus from onshore varies quite a bit depending on local circumstances, and trolling proper is only a thing you potentially might do in the former situation.
I should note FWIW that as of the late 1980’s I became aware (by social interaction with some of its young male alums) that at at least one prominent and academically prestigious U.S. university (admittedly, one located in the Midwest) “trolling” had a specific sexual-slang sense that delicacy forbids me from describing in any detail, but the semantic extension was one that had almost certainly first arisen among people familiar with the fishing sense. This must have been shortly before the internet sense started to become widely known.
perhaps fishing and hunting are both more mainstream recreational hobbies in the U.S. than in Europe?
Depends how you define “Europe” or “U.S.”. In Serbia hunting appears to be very popular, and arguably more mainstream than in Massachusetts.
Also depends what you mean by “recreational hobby”. I worked with a manufacturing company in Arkansas that was forced to shut down during deer season every fall because the workers would have refused to come to work. I think that sort of dedication to hunting goes well beyond “recreational hobby” and falls into “way of life”.
Yes, I’m sure if I polled my remaining relatives in Arkansas I’d find lots of hunters and fishers.
На одном конце червяк на другом конце дурак.
Most people in US don’t leave in a big city, or even in a middling size city (97 mil. in cities > 100,000 pop and about 69 mil. in cities > 200,000 pop. ) Anyway, there should be some gap between “what arithmetic majority knows” and “arcane”. Trolling may be in this gap.
I just checked out the details and turns out I am much more familiar with the practice of trolling than I thought I was, but yeah it’s all thru Finland’s summer cottage culture, I know basically no one who goes fishing in the city (even if there are too several well-known sites for this across the Helsinki region).
On trawling the verb, it is surely mostly known to people primarily from the non-fishing use as ‘search thru, pore over’; and, before the internet, no similar situation appears to have been the case for trolling; maybe this had transferred to the former being also the better-known fishing technique?
Also maybe worth noting that there’s an interestingly similar internet metaphor also in phishing.
FWIW I took a quick and incomplete glimpse in the google books corpus for hits between 1970 and 1990 (to screen out the rise of the internet usage) for “trolling,” from which it appears: a) the majority of hits came in books and periodicals with a specific fishing or at least “outdoor pursuits” theme; b) a significant minority were in less specialized mass-market periodicals whose readership is not primarily urban/elite (e.g. Boys Life, Popular Mechanics, the Rotarian …); but c) I found one usage in an echt-urban/elite publication (New York magazine), but in a metaphorical extension having to do with advertising/marketing practices. I don’t know whether the extension was standard among the jargon of ad-agency or marketing professionals as of 1989.
Well, if Space Is An Ocean, then so are the innertubes. After all you surf on them.
I have certainly been fishing,* but to call it “recreation” would be an overstatement.
* The first time was in urban Chicagoland.