Exactly my point. Someone who is here to troll has little or no desire to be doing electronics stuff. Most of their participation is in off-topic (and often controversial topics) or new technology stuff (often controversial or damaging to old theories).

And those things are also topics they can post to numerous forums, because they are not specific to electronics. So they can troll multiple forums at once by posting the same pap.

If someone is here primarily to cause a big fuss and mess people up it should become pretty obvious.

There is one here, and it is obvious. In fact, this one fits your description so well, and its appearance coincides so perfectly with this thread, that I wonder if we are being spoofed. I have stopped feeding it, and am going to sit back and watch. Thus far, it hasn't claimed to be a rock star or a double naught spy, but that may be next.

 

There is one here, and it is obvious. In fact, this one fits your description so well, and its appearance coincides so perfectly with this thread, that I wonder if we are being spoofed. I have stopped feeding it, and am going to sit back and watch. Thus far, it hasn't claimed to be a rock star or a double naught spy, but that may be next.

Yup, I know who you mean and I thought the same thing but then after laughing at some of the posted topics and the overly thoughtful responses he landed I began to think it could be a troll or it could be a severe case of abulia...
Assuming we are talking about the same individual.

 

Please let's not start pointing fingers.

It was not my intention to hint that someone might be a troll, just to point out the fact that IF someone was here primarily to cause trouble that it will become quite obvious over time.

 

Had to look up, "abulia". Impairment of the ability to make decisions or act independently. Sounds like a severe case of being a blond. My nephew's wife has it so bad that she goes aphasic when I ask her a direct question. Not a laughing matter. She actually has significant, permanent, brain damage from a car accident.

Didn't mean to hijack the troll discussion. Just looking up a word I didn't know, and other people might also benefit from the definition.

 

It seemed like a strange word to be found in English. Until I realized it was Greek.

 

You do that a lot

 

I do. I'm vain like that...

 

IF someone was here primarily to cause trouble that it will become quite obvious over time.

I disagree. A sufficiently talented troll can disguise their efforts almost indefinitely. In fact, a troll's most obvious trait is their intelligence coupled by boredom. They want to relieve their boredom and causing trouble is a secondary result.

Trolling should never be confused with someone who is irrational, illogical or simply delusional. They don't have the attributes of a troll, though sometimes their wacky diatribes can inadvertently hijack a thread.

 

It seemed like a strange word to be found in English. Until I realized it was Greek.

It seems most of the English language has anything but English origins.

 

That's exactly true.

Even social class has formed our language. Consider how we name our meat and the animals it comes from differently. This comes from the peasants who would work with these animals (and very rarely eat them) who spoke an old form of english, but the noblemen who ate these animals (and rarely worked with them) would speak French and Latin. That's why there is a distinct difference between the feeling of 'deer' and 'venison'.

Interesting to note that the language of the world was mostly French, up until (I think) the 1700s/1800s. Of course, the language of the learned was Latin. If you didn't know Latin, you were a nobody in academia. I would hate to have to write papers in Latin today.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the English language, is because it so much a part of most European languages, it is very easy to identify with. I've been told by foreign friends that they think English is very easy to learn to speak because of this. However, they also say that it is very hard to learn to write, because we have so many rules and exceptions that you have to memorise the spelling of words. Possibly, this is due to the mixture of languages which have not been tampered with too much, so we haven't really developed a strict set of rules of our own.

Sparky

 

Lately, technology has affected our language more than any other vector. Few realize that they are speaking Russing when they use words like Robot and Video (to work and to see respectively). English is the current Lingua Franca because of it's ability to incorporate other languages and then evolve even further often including simplification. This can be seen with many urban dialects opting out of conjugating irregular verbs. Other languages are quick to catch on to this and have become far more flexible. Ten years ago, Scuba in Russia was refered to as "underwater swimming". Today the word is just like here in the USA: diving. Just transliterate it using the Cyrillic alphabet. In fact, if you learn their alphabet, getting around in Moscow is pretty simple.