Driving on the Capital Beltway this afternoon, the thought struck me that a word we don't use often enough nowadays is 'monger'. We have fishmongers and fearmongers (and as a bandmate pointed out, ironmongers), but not a whole lot of other mongers, which is a shame, since it's a perfectly good combining word and a reasonably good word on its own.
That is to say, weapons dealers should be 'armsmongers', Barnes and Noble would be 'bookmongers', the New York Times would be a 'newsmonger', Amazon and Google and other suppliers of 'cloud' data storage are 'bitmongers', we could call footwear salesmen 'shoemongers', pharmacists would be 'drugmongers', and politicians could be 'liemongers'.
Anyone care to guess what I observed while driving that sparked this chain of thought?
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a whole bunch of teamongers?
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Every time I see one of those electronic signs that's been set to say, "Report supicious activity," and show the DHS tip line phone number, I think, "You mean like someone putting up fearmongering signs over roadways?" And this time I went from that to thinking about the word 'fearmonger'.