I just had a couple of questions kicking around in my head, and they finally bothered me enough I needed to ask them.
What is coventry?
I always see this posted in troll heavy threads, but I have no idea what the connection is.
What does IIRC mean?
Were there always this many trolls around?
I only post to a couple of BB, but I read several. I noticed they all had a huge troll flood after Jan 1st. Is this some human Y2K glitch, or did I just start noticing the trolls?
Ok, I think that about wraps it up for me. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
In one of Heinlein’s stories coventry was a large, fenced-in, wild terrain where criminals could be sent rather than face the punishment of the courts. The theory was that you don’t have to agree with the laws or accept the court’s judgement but if you don’t then you can’t live in their society anymore. Basically if you don’t agree with the rules of the society they aren’t forced on you but you are isolated from it.
A really cool avenue in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. At least it was back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the Cleveland area.
Used to drive over there all the time in 1976-78 to get my hippie shit. Handmade sandals, marijuana pipes, cutting-edge music, subversive literature. Still have a “Coventry Books” bookmark tacked to my office bulletin board, even though it closed in the early '80s. They had Arabica, a designer coffee joint, there 20 years before it became hip in Seattle (probably aping the coffee places in North Beach and Greenwich Village). First saw Rocky Horror there, at the theater on the corner of Euclid Heights Blvd.
To send somebody to Coventry means to exclude him or her from the group, to refuse to associate with or speak to him or her.
The saying might arise from the fact that, during the Civil War, supporters of the King who were captured in Birmingham (a divided city) were routinely taken to Coventry (a neighbouring but strongly Parliamentarian city).
Presumably Heinlein picked the name because it alredy had that association.
I had assumed that it was a reference to Churchill’s (possibly nonexistent) decision not to warn Coventry of an impending German bombing raid. He thereby concealed the fact that they’d broken a German encryption code, but at the price of many buildings and people. Seemed like a fair source for the whole shunning and turning one’s back on metaphor.
Unfortunately, that happened in November of 1940, and Heinlein’s story of the same name was published in Astounding during July of that year. Close, but no cigar.
Too bad Word for the Wise couldn’t nail it down more precisely.
Sure, I’m all for moderation – as long as it’s not excessive.
About This Message Board is the place where you should have posted this message. On a good day you may have see the thread about trolls and coventry and IIRC - Somedays they don’t show up at all so at least you got an answer by posting here.
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
I dunno. Trolls pass through on a regular basis. On the other hand, there is the distressing habit, here, (I don’t hang out in a lot of different MBs or NGs for comparison purposes) to call everyone who is disliked a troll. Since just about everyone can be disliked by someone, the troll appellation flies all over this MB.
Guys like Phaedrus, bj0rn, Homer, Mark Serlin, and John John are not stereotypical trolls, they don’t really post simply to get a rise out of people. I think most of them are posting looking for validation for their beliefs. (That isn’t too much different from what we all do, in the long run.) Their difference is that when they find a place where their attitudes are generally scorned, they see that as validation since they are obviously smarter/wiser/more astute/better informed than the rest of us.
Mike Masterson, jayburner, and a few others really are trolling. If they work as hard at it as jay, they will get banned pretty quickly. Then it is a matter of whether it is worth their effort to keep finding new sign-ons just to keep getting banned.
Since this site opened up, the Contestant#3 wars and the moderator dispute each lasted several weeks. Phaedrus was his own furor for a long time before the New Year. If I put some energy into it, I could probably think of some sort of excitement every month for the last twelve. That is pretty consistent with the record back when we were on AOL.
A lot of people, here, post with attitude and a lot of new people bristle at that attitude. It sort of goes with the territory. (A lot of bristly new people hang around to become evil regs and raise the hackles on newer people.) One of the evil regs back on AOL (I believe it was Vegforlife) likened the troll-and-hated-poster syndrome to having a sore tooth: you know you should leave it alone, but you can’t help probing it with your tongue to see whether it is as bad as it was a few minutes ago.
Every one of us has the power to ignore the twits and enjoy the MB. Very few of us have the will to exercise that power.
Sending someone to Coventry is a punishment meted out in English schools. Someone does something bad like squeal on a classmate and the other schoolchildren banish the first to Coventry. No one is allowed to speak to the squealer. I don’t know if English schoolchildren do this anymore but I read about it in Enid Blyton’s books when I was a kid. Don’t know the origin of this. It’s also a county or city in England.
Here, many of the New Year trolls were not random jerks, but posters from another board who felt that they had been jerked around by some posters from this board.
As far as this being a Web-wide phenomenon, I would guess that it correlates with Christmas gifts of computers & heavy mailings of coasters by AOL & other ISPs, encouraging people to create temporary IDs & e-mail addresses. But that is strictly conjecture on my part.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
The OED gives examples from as early as the 17th Century, so it must pre-date the Second World War. The etymology I offered above is the one which it seems to attach most weight to, although there is an alternative one:
This seems unlikely to be the origin, since an earlier account is available:
Interesting that the term Coventry found use on modern BBs, when there’s also Amish “shunning,” the Exclusive Brethren’s “withdrawal,” and Dianetics’ “disconnection.”
Sure, I’m all for moderation – as long as it’s not excessive.