Word: trolled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...winter, odd-shaped metal boxes and barbed wire were placed across hot-air exhaust grates to keep homeless people from sleeping in the neighborhood. A center helping the homeless in downtown San Diego burned in a fire classified as arson. And in Santa Cruz, Calif., where vagrants are called trolls, the police brass felt it necessary to warn their officers not to wear TROLL BUSTER T shirts while off duty...
...have subsided since last fall, partly because of publicity and legal actions filed on behalf of victims. A flurry of civil suits in Winnemucca, Nev., charge that the 20- member police force has been tossing "undesirables" into garbage pits or driving them deep into the desert and leaving them. Troll-busting attacks on the homeless in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz are sharply down from 1984. But the intimidation appears to have taken its toll nonetheless. "After the attacks and the shooting into the bushes and cars where they sleep, a lot of the street people have left town...
...Phoenix, a Sunbelt mecca for jobless Northerners, the city in the past two years has closed three soup kitchens and torn down ten welfare hotels. The city still has 3,000 street people. In Santa Cruz, Calif., last summer, there were 19 attacks on homeless people, known locally as trolls because they live under bridges. Many of the assaults were attributed to teen-agers, some of whom later sported TROLL BUSTER T shirts...
Unfortunately, Heller uses this poetic license chiefly as an excuse to troll for gags. If a punch line requires omniscience, then David knows it all: "Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the P.L.O." So the old fellow is up on Yasser Arafat and the contemporary mess in the Middle East? Yes and no. When Heller wants to try for irony...
...Troll, to yourself...