Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

About 35 years ago, there was a big kerfuffle in Fort Wayne when a case came before an older judge.  As I remember it, a guy was brought before the judge.  He had come on to a woman in a bar, her boyfriend, who had been paying little attention, took it on himself to defend the woman's honor, and nobody agreed as to who started the fight, and the judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence.  The judge then said, again according to my memory (which is as leakproof as a steel sieve), that women dress up in revealing clothing and go out barhopping, trolling, and it's no wonder that guys act a little crazy.

I think the attorney for the state was a woman.  In any case, before you could say Jack Robinson, the various fem lib organizations were screaming that women had a right to wear provocative (my term, not hers) attire and if a young buck (my term, not hers) was provoked (my term, not hers), he was the one that was out of line.  And they tried to ensure that this judge was defeated in the next election.  But mostly, there was a flurry of news articles, all featuring the word "trolling" in the headlines or leed of the story.

Anyhow, I got to thinking about the "tole painting" the Beelzebub, my first wife's mother did, and I looked up tole in the dictionary, to see what it encompassed.  As a noun, I got my answer, but as a verb, it's a synonym for a couple of verb definitions for toll:

 

5.

to lure or decoy (game) by arousing curiosity.

6.

to allure; entice: He tolls us on with fine promises.

Sure sounds like toling or tolling means the same thing as trolling.

Troll comes from

1350-1400; Middle English trollen to roll, stroll < Middle French troller to run here and there < Middle High German trollen walk or run with short steps

while toll comes from:

before 1000; (noun) Middle English, Old English toll (cognate with Dutch tol, German Zoll, Old Norse tollr), assimilated variant of Old English toln < Late Latin tol?n?um, for tel?n?um < Greek tel?neîon tollhouse, akin to tel?n?s tax collector, télos tax; (v.) Middle English tollen, derivative of the noun

Well, I imagine that if you're trolling for fellas, you're strolling, or a streetwalker, and once you attract the guy, you charge a toll, although the lady in question would have wanted a long-term contract rather than a small fistful of greenbacks.  We've certainly come a long way since the 1950s, when a woman who admitted to enjoying relations was considered a tramp, while today, most babies born to women under 30 are conceived by a man not married to their mother.  The change in the language has come about so fast, it presents a danger to men who can't accurately read the mind of a woman.