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

[Victor Steinbok]

I have only seen this reference on liberal/progressive blogs in comments
or related chat. I have never seen this to be an issue on
conservative-leaning blogs, but, obviously, my experience is limited
(can't really prove a negative here).

One variant includes people who really aren't on the opposite side, but
are always looking for flaws in the political arsenal of the side they
support. Some variants get special names, according to the types of
arguments they make.

One of the late variants is "emo prog" or "emoprog" and there is some
disagreement as to who qualifies as one. One definition is someone who
expresses concern about Obama/Democrats from the Left on a left-leaning
blog. Emoprogs generally are angry about the state of affairs or
perceived or expected state of affairs. Generally, they attack those
commentators they see insufficiently progressive on some issue--for
example, a common attack on Obama supporters is that they ignore the
administration's abysmal record on human rights (usual retort, "Just
like Bush!"), corporatism, militarism, etc. UD entry suggests there is a
bit more there, although, from discussions with blog-commentators, UD
description is too restrictive--but it also suggests the new "less
divisive" term as "puritopian".

As for Martin's comment, I am not sure who "us" is. If this is a
restriction to active, paying ADS members, I'll defer to them. But if
the comment is to everyone on this list, I fundamentally disagree. We
now have opportunities available to analyze language change and
variation as it happens--opportunities that have never before been
available or have been in development for several generations. Had we
had such resources in the 1940s and 50s, we might know today where
"nerd" and "Murphy's law" came from. As it stands, we have to guess
instead. This is like telling mathematicians that they can't use
computers in their research because traditional pure mathematics does
not allow for this possibility. Although there are purists who believe
just that, for the majority of practitioners this just sounds silly.

     VS-)

On 4/9/2012 1:22 PM, Martin Kaminer wrote:
> I really don't think it's constructive for our group to be focusing on this
> term; I believe it would be wise for us to devote ourselves solely to
> traditional dialect analysis and not get wrapped up in things that are so
> contemporary.  The best course for us IMHO would be to restrict ourselves
> to examining usage from the 19th Century at the latest, ideally earlier,
> because of the availability of references and the scholastic consensus that
> comes with time.

On 4/9/2012 12:08 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> ...
> 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.
>
> ...
>
> An early WOTY candidate, or has everyone been aware of concern trolling for longer than I have?  Ben?
>
> LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org