Fish, Cheese, and Gossip: 2,000 Years of Snobbery in the Suffix ‘‑Monger’

My linguistic interests generally focus not on words but on the system of constraints on the structure of the sentences in which they’re deployed. But the curious class of words formed with ‑monger intrigues me. It seems to reflect a hint of snobbery that goes back thousands of years.

In modern sources, ‑monger is hardly ever found alone; it is what linguists call a combining form: Like ‑ology, it combines with some other component to form a new noun. But the class of words it can combine with is strangely restricted.

The core of the class is a handful of nouns denoting household necessities: cheese, fish, and iron. Where I live, retail shopping is not limited to Amazon and the big supermarkets and drugstores; there are little winding side streets with highly specialist stores: whisky specialists, kilt shops, bagpipe makers, confectioners, bakeries, greengrocers, and quite a few cheesemongers, fishmongers, and ironmongers.

(Costermonger belonged to the same subfamily of words. A costard was a ribbed variety of large apple. Traders selling costards from a barrow were known as costermongers, and the same term was later applied to other street traders too. The word has now fallen out of use.)

What is surprising about ‑monger is its resistance to more general use. Even here in Edinburgh you simply do not see shops touting themselves as a *bookmongers, *cardmongers, *dressmongers, *drugmongers, or *shoemongers. (My asterisks mark invented examples that follow the pattern of cheesemonger. I do not claim that no one has ever used any of them anywhere, but only that they are not in common use.)

But there is another semantic class of nouns that commonly take ‑monger, and it poses a puzzle. The members seem at first rather miscellaneous: rumor, scandal, sleaze, war, doom, fear, and hate, for example. What could be the connection to cheese?

Monger comes from Old English mangere via Middle English mongere, and has meant “merchant” since common Germanic, as seen in Old Saxon mongari, Old High German mangari, Old Icelandic mangari, etc. The Germanic word appears to be the result of sticking the Germanic agent-forming suffix on a classical Latin root denoting a dealer or trader in slaves or prostitutes — with concomitant pejorative overtones.

The family-resemblance connection uniting the common ‑monger words is subtle, but perceptible. The link is an ancient deprecative attitude toward low-level traders selling household essentials and the sort of chit-chat you find among such people. They sell cheese or fish, trade scrap metal, and exchange rumors and gossip about fears and conflicts. That’s the way to link cheesemongers to scandalmongers, or ironmongers to warmongers.

Of course some writers indulge in occasional extensions that stray outside this core, especially for humorous effect. Martha Bayles, in The Wall Street Journal (January 26, 1987) jocularly uses the suffix as a verb. Calling TV talk-show hosts “gabmongers” (which fits well enough with the gossip theme), she adds that Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey “may share a similar format, but they monger very different types of gab.” That’s a humorous stretching of normal usage.

The lie of the lexical heartland nonetheless remains clear. The Wall Street Journal uses ‑monger in many ways, but my generalization can be glimpsed through the variety. Two uses between 1987 and 1989 involved nouns naming household staples: five cases of fishmonger and one sporadic mention of “free-enterprise tomatomongers from southern, uncollectivized pockets of the U.S.S.R.” Nearly all of the others attach the suffix to abstract nouns relating either to chit-chat (advice, chat, fact, gab, idea, phrase, rumor, scandal, story, and yuk in the sense of “joke”) or dark and worrying things one might chat about (coup, doom, fear, gloom, guilt, revolution, scare, sleaze, hate, war).

Just three quirky exceptions (out of 74 occurrences in 44 million words) fail to fit the pattern: a remark about “second-rate English aria-mongers"; a reference to John Adams as a “glitz-monger” (he liked parades); and one mention of what “worries the growth-mongers.”

But overall we see a subtle hint of a unitary deprecative attitude toward merchants of simple homely wares and their marketplace tittle-tattle. It seems to have survived, as a default limitation on where ‑monger should attach, for at least 2,000 years.

Modern linguistics often stresses syntactic findings suggesting neurally implemented infrastructure in the human brain. Such explanations cannot apply to facts of this sort. The inheriting of semantic constraints on word-formation down the generations is not mediated by genetics and neurophysiology. Here culture is the operative factor. A continuous tradition of snobbery regarding market traders and chit-chatting merchants, going back at least to classical Roman times, still constraining the structure of the English lexicon today. Amazing.