Friday, March 28, 2008

Mongerous morphology in the Onion

The Onion has a good piece this week, here, called:
Fearmongers, Warmongers Gather For Annual Mongering Conference
They get hatemongering in there too, of course, and close with a note about "next week's fish- and whoremongering conference in El Paso, TX." There's a good set of in part newer terms (let's not touch where or whether to use a hyphen ), like rumor-mongering, hope-mongering, disease-mongering, word-mongering, etc. Google around a little and you'll find doom-mongering, monger-mongering, and so much more.

But the Onion loves derivational productivity at a deeper level than that:
… fearmonger Gerald Sachs mongered. "Of course, with the current political and social climate, the main question is whether next year will be anywhere near as mongerly."
Go Onion.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Log has picked up this theme: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005505.html#more

Pullum apparently doesn't know about hope-mongering, word-mongering and some of the other newer ones.

I confess to a little disappointment that you didn't go into the history, which must have some wrinkles to it.