new (to me) lexical item: "concern trolling"

[Alice Faber]

On 4/9/12 12:08 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> from a student's reading response (shout-out to Elizabeth Freeburg), a definition (from the usual suspects) and two recent examples of the activity provided by Freeburg:
>
> In online political discussions, opposing parties often try to derail one another’s conversations. One common type of derailing is known as “concern trolling,” which Urban Dictionary defines like so:
>
> In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with "concerns". The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you're an ally.
>
> In a recent and particularly egregious case, journalist Geraldo Rivera suggested that the proper reaction to the shooting of Trayvon Martin was to forbid young teens of color from wearing hooded sweatshirts. This concern trolling put the onus of preventing racially motivated violence on the victims, while pretending to be focused on their welfare. […]
>
> The most-liked comments on Douglas Quenqua’s [2/29/12] NYTimes article “They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve” show many examples of concern trolling. The article is a defense of the linguistic features of young women, specifically vocal fry, along with uptalk and the use of “like.”  The comments tend more toward the prescriptive. […]
>
> (see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?pagewanted=2 for examples)
>
> An early WOTY candidate, or has everyone been aware of concern trolling for longer than I have?  Ben?

The phrase has been used on progressive blogs like pandagon.com,  for a
number of years. The oldest instance I can find in a quick search of
shakesville.com is from 2007:
<http://www.shakesville.com/2007/06/fight-teh-gay-with-sharpie.html>.
The oldest one I can find on Pandagon is mid-2008. Both instances
presume that the reader will understand the term without any explication.


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Alice Faber                                       faber at haskins.yale.edu
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