The story
Named after an incident from an Anthony Trollope novel in which a woman interprets a casual romantic gesture as a marriage proposal.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Trollope ploy
Today it means: A negotiation technique in which a proposal from another party is deliberately misinterpreted in such a way that it is more to the responding party's liking, with the aim of having the misinterpreted version accepted in the interests of diplomacy. Full definition →