Wordmonger

It's all quite depressing.

To distract myself I decided to try to think of as many words as I could that end in "-monger". I could only think of "fishmonger" and "hatemonger" besides the two aforementioned ones. Not satisfied, I let the CD-Rom edition of Merriam-Webster's 3rd tell me what it knew:

• balladmonger
• barbermonger
• boroughmonger
• carpetmonger
• cornmonger
• costardmonger (that's NOT a misspelling of "custardmonger")
• costermonger
• fashionmonger
• fellmonger
• fishmonger
• fleshmonger
• gossipmonger
• hatemonger
• ideamonger
• ironmonger
• mealmonger
• meritmonger
• newsmonger
• peacemonger
• pearmonger
• phrasemonger
• pleasuremonger
• rumormonger
• scandalmonger
• scaremonger
• sensation-monger
• statemonger
• versemonger
• warmonger
• whoremonger
• wondermonger
• woodmonger
• wordmonger

I love how random some of these words seem. Most often "-monger" seems to be coupled with a word to connote an unfavorable opinion ("scare", "scandal", "gossip"), but then you stumble across one that is probably much older and employs the more archaic sense of "monger" which was simply a peddler of a certain trade ("corn", "wood", "iron", and "fish") -- how much saner of a world would it be if GWB were simply a dealer of wood or pears?

I also have a fondness for the last entry on the list; thinking that "wordmonger" (a dealer in words: as a: one that uses words for show or without enough regard for meaning) would have been the name of this blog had I not thought of "LOGOLOG" first.

An interesting batch or words, no doubt.

-- Eric

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