"Troll" is a word that has strangely metamorphosized in the course of my lifetime. While It once had warm associations; now, not so much.
"Troll" came into my life in the late 1940s at Makamah Beach on the Long Island Sound. My grandmother Sonia taught me how to "troll" for bluefish or sunfish. Here's how you do it. You paddle slowly and let your "shiner" dangle on fishing line a few yards behind the rowboat. "Troll" is very like "trawl." Perhaps the two words are variants; or perhaps "troll" is a distant descendent of Latin trahere, to drag." Troll is related to "trolley," a device used to drag things from place to place, as a trolley does its passengers. "Troll" seems to incorporate the meaning "wander" or "wander into."
From my early interest in northern mythology (a "mythology," by the way, is someone else's religion), I learned that a "troll" is a clumsy ugly monster who hides out under bridges or in cemeteries. Trolls were troublesome, provocative, perhaps even cannibalistic.
But nowadays, the older meanings of "troll" have been superseded. A 'troll' is now a person who participates in a conversation, usually an internet conversation, with the intention of sowing discord or causing trouble. I am not sure about the origin of this usage, but I would like to guess or hypothesize that it combines the sense of "wandering into" with the malevolence of the Scandinavian figure. A troll is therefore an electronic ogre.
Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.
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