The Three Routes to Emotion-Moving

I think the dominant use of the term trolls and trolling nowadays is in the context of what I call my definition of trolling, having gone through this data set, is emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. And so any time we’re moving emotion. This idea of movement is intrinsic to the TR sound, the TR sound in travel, transition, trans, transcend, and in oodles of other words. So movement is in there. And this idea of moving emotions, which is common, whether it’s an evangelical preacher driving the emotions of their audience, on the internet all of us are being trolled each day by the neural network algorithm which is driving the for-you feed, and equally we’re trolled a million times a day by our pets, by our lovers, by our children, by advertisers. And so for me this is common, this is the essence I hoped I would find.

Source: Pattern Recognition: Perennial characters in Disinfolklore

Connects the etymology of “troll” (TR = movement) to the universal phenomenon of emotion-moving. Shows that the definition is not arbitrary but linguistically grounded in the oldest stratum of Indo-European sound symbolism.

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