Every week, you may find Lisa Quinn’s husband puttering in the Hawkesbury River in his tinnie. Lover of the elements, the mangrove quiet, Terry spends hours trying to outsmart mulloway. Yet, his biggest challenge is a verb.
According to Lisa at least, who dropped a line – a query, I mean. Her email set the scene: early morning, the Evinrude purring, Terry slides upstream or down, testing his luck with a spinner. He calls it trawling, while Lisa (at home) thinks trolling fits the bill. Who’s right?
Unqualified as a marriage counsellor, I’m calling it evens. Though if push comes to shove, Lisa has the edge. Both actions stem from tragelen in Dutch, meaning to drag, linking to Latin’s trahere, to pull. A fertile root, this gives us tract (a stretch of land) and contract (to draw in), distract and extract and all those other kinetic verbs.
In Terry’s case, he’s dragging a lure, seeking to attract a fish. Trawling fits the bill, as does trolling, its poetic cousin, springing from troller in Old French, meaning to wander. You may troll the hills of Tyrol, say, following a trail, which also shares the French source. As does trolley, wandering the aisle.
Stroll, however, is more family friend than relative. The verb hails from Strolch in German, a vagabond, potentially tied to astrologo in Italian, as many mediaeval drifters often turned a penny with fortune-telling. Or that’s one theory. But let’s return to Terry and that mulloway dilemma. Are trawl and troll synonyms?
Yes and no say most dictionaries. In the Macquarie, say, trawl’s fifth definition is troll, a straight swap. The snag lies in Definitions 1-4, which all involve a net. While Meaning 3 gets messier, bringing the bottom into the picture: “to fish with a net whose edge is dragged along the sea bottom to catch the fish living there”. Terry doesn’t do that.
He uses a single line, mid-depth. One rod, one spinner, one tinnie. The nuance is spelt out by the Alaska Gold Seafood Company of all websites, saying, “Trolling and trawling sound alike, but differ in how they work and their effects on the ocean. A troller is a vessel operated by a single fisherman or two to three people (not infrequently family members) that pull hooks through the water typically targeting a single species such as wild king salmon.”
Trawling by contrast is omnivorous, the net swallowing any nonchalant ling lingering, plus random “bycatch” minding its own business. Look up troll and the commercial vibe is lost. The net vanishes, the factory ship sinks. Trolling is “to fish with a moving line”, be that lured or baited. Said aloud, there’s a melodic charm about troll, echoing Definition 5 (obsolete) – “to sing or utter in a full rolling voice”. Terry, I’d say, has his recreational verb in troll, so long as we ignore the gremlin in the room.
Since Tolkien’s trolls draw on the same wandery root, as do the toxic derailers of chatrooms and X threads who roam the web with malign intent. Terry doesn’t do that. Terry likes to fish up and down the Hawkesbury. And in the name of conjugal harmony, let’s leave it at that.
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
