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Old 07-09-2015, 02:28 AM   #176
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
The depth of ignorance on the part of the buying public can truly be amazing at times. The fact so many here have bought into the notion that a toy recreational boat is a 'trawler" which is a term describing a method of fishing and the boat used to do it with shows how effective this particular marketing scam really was.

The scam, for those of you who still don't get it, was to make an inexpensive pleasure boat aka cabin cruiser appear to be more rugged and "tough" than it really was by sticking the name of a commercial fishing vessel on it in the hopes that the toy boat crowd would be fooled into thinking they were getting a much more capable, strong, better built boat than they actually were. It's marketing hype pure and simple and the fact that so many people, including most of the people on this forum apparently, bought into it shows how successful the hype was and how gullible the boat-buying public actually is.

Yes, language evolves where it makes sense, but that doesn't mean that every incorrect or ignorant use of a word is automatically correct. It just means the user is ignorant, at least of the language.

The fact the boat manufactures picked "trawler" back in the 70s when all this started, was just a happy accident. They could have picked "troller" or "seiner" or "dragger" or "crabber" and it would have worked just as well. Then you lot would be heartily defending the notion that your boats are "recreational seiners" or "recreational draggers" or, if we apply a more modern commercial fishing term, "recreational combination boats."

It would still be as stupidly wrong, but I'm sure the cabin cruiser crowd would have bought into any of these other fishing boat types as heartily as they bought into "trawler."

There are two things that really annoy me: revisionist history and ignorance of one's language. I don't give a crap what a person wants to call their boat. But using the word "trawler" to describe the kinds of boats everyone on this forum has tells me a hell of a lot more about the owner than it does about the person's boat which these days is as likely to be a SeaRay as a Grand Banks.

Ironically American Marine, whose Grand Banks line of boats became the quintessential example of a "recreational trawler" in the boat-buying public's eyes, never called them that. Grand Banks, Llc does today, of course. They have to as the incorrect use of this term has become so ingrained in the boating world they'd totally confuse their market if they didn't.

The folks at American Marine, however, were clearly paying attention in school during the lessons on nouns and they called their new Grand Banks boats exactly what they are: "Dependable Diesel Cruisers." Meaning, for those of you who have a tough time with all definitions, a boat to go cruising in, not the warship, which of course got its name for the same reason only with guns.
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