Die-hard pedants are still holding out against the acceptance of “gift” as a verb (why gift when you can simply give?) but no one seems to mind the omnipresence of “troll”.

“Sorry I trolled you” said a friend who’d posted a nasty comment about one of my cats on Instagram. It’s not that he hates cats; he was just in a bad mood, possibly because someone else had trolled him.

Like gift, this troll verb was originally a noun. An internet troll, in Wikipedia’s words, is “a person who sows discord in an online community by starting arguments or upsetting people”...