Various political strategies and policies over the last decade have me thinking, “What are all the things that can be mongered? How on earth does the term ‘fear-monger’ even make sense given the literal meaning of monger? Does fear really only cost five cents?”
Well, these are the questions meant for idle time. And, as we all know, idle hands either spend time at the genitals and/or surf the internet. Luckily, the Oxford English Dictionary is here to help. Monger is a very old word in the English language with pre-dating cognates in Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and ultimately Latin (possibly of the same PIE root as “merchant”). Although we rarely see monger outside of the context of “fish-monger” or the occasional last name, it has a rich history in English with the connotatively positive meaning of “a merchant, trader, dealer, or trafficker.” This was the meaning and for just over a millennium before the pejorative meaning became the more prominent in the sixteenth century when Anglo-Norman and Old French loan words had been the language of prestige for several generations, starting around 1200CE. Once monger underwent pejoration, it came to mean “a person engaged in a petty or disreputable trade or traffic.” Other than in rare compounds like “fish-monger,” the term almost exclusively exists with its negative connotation.
The earliest use that I can find of a socio-political “X-monger” comes in the sixteenth century in regard to Church officials:
1550. J. Bale, Image Both Churches xviii. sig. Bbvj, “Foule priestes,.. and holy water mongers dayly peruerting the ignorant people.”
The practice of selling indulgences puts this quotation in its context, and the usage fits the literal meaning of “a person engaged in trade” since priests were actively selling blessings. From the OED record, it appears that once statements like the above became popular, the actual “trade or traffic” portion of “X-monger” fell out of favor; whence we get S. Butler’s “States-Monger,” R. Southey’s “humanity-mongers,” C. Kingsley’s (my favorite) “verbal-inspiration-monger,” M. Twain’s “superstition monger,” and a stellar consonant phrase in Face, “nihilistic noise-mongers.” You can really feel the nasals on that one.
As far as “fearmonger” goes, Ngram spits out a rather interesting chart which indicates the word was first used in 1939 and underwent rather unsteady periods of vogue usage. It had an exceptional, printed introduction in LIFE Magazine on January 9, 1939 in a letter to the editor by E. Lloyd Souder Jr., who was criticizing LIFE’s previous article on America’s pre-WWII policy that an outright attack is the best defense. Although LIFE Magazine is a for-profit publication, I doubt that they were literally selling fear. With the help of imminent war political uncertainty, it was an instant success in both the US and Britain. Thus it reaches us today.
Source-mongers:
www.google.com, which provides both Ngram and Google Books.
The Oxford English Dictionary, Web Edition [available thanks to the University of Pittsburgh]
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