This week, many people may be worried about the “fear-mongering” around Ebola. Others may wonder which “rumor-mongering” politician to vote for (or not vote for). And some will simply stop by the “fishmonger” on the way home from work for a nice piece of cod.
A “monger” started in English as a “merchant, trader, dealer, or trafficker,” frequently “of a specified commodity,” The Oxford English Dictionary says; in the 16th century, “monger” took on sinister overtones, as “a person engaged in a petty or disreputable trade or traffic.”
Webster’s New World College Dictionary calls a “monger” a “dealer in tricked-out wares,” and says it perhaps arises from a Latin word for a “device for deceiving,” related to “mangle.”
That’s what most “mongers” do today: They mangle truth or fact to deceive. Thus we have combinations like “warmonger,” someone who, as WNW says, is “person bent on promoting or bringing about war.”
The use of “monger” in benign, merchant contexts has dwindled almost to quaintness: Of nearly a thousand “X-monger” combinations that show up in Nexis in the past six months, barely a handful refer to a “fishmonger,” “cheesemonger” or other purveyor of actual goods instead of bad.
The most frequent appearance of “monger” is as part of a gerund, a verb playing the role of a noun. Thus we more commonly see “fear-mongering” for the spreading of the fear, rather than “fearmonger” for the spreader. (The “monger” combinations appear as either hyphenated or solid, though the hyphen prevails in most news contexts for the gerund.)
Not surprisingly, “fear-mongering” often is tied to frightening events. In fact, the first use of “fearmonger” was in 1939, Merriam-Webster says, and we all know what was happening around then. “Fearmonger” soon overtook its predecessor, “scaremonger,” which traces to 1888.
“Rumormonger” is slightly older (but no wiser), first showing up in 1884. Its use seems to peak around elections. Wonder why?
People often pick up their rumors around the water cooler. That’s an old tradition: On board ships, sailors would gather around a cask with an opening for a dipper. The cask was called a “scuttle” (a bucket or other carrier, like a “coal scuttle”). Another word for that “scuttle” was a “butt.”
And thus, around 1801, was born “scuttle-butt,” for the nautical version of a drinking fountain. It took another hundred years, and the Americans, to make “scuttlebutt” into the rumors often traded around the water cooler. Which you should “scuttle” instead of pass around.
Merrill Perlman managed copy desks across the newsroom at the New York Times, where she worked for twenty-five years. Follow her on Twitter at @meperl.