Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Citations for wordmonger
Try reading Mr. Gass's essays not as statements but as counterstatements, as in an argument where one of the speakers is solid, a bit dull, relentlessly correct, and the other fellow is, intellectually, a bit of a rake, a rhetorician, a word monger and a joy to behold, a Gass. The price the literary rake pays for his dazzle is that his works stay in the reader's mind not as convincing arguments but as things the reader wishes he had said ...
He lectured with consummate elegance, in a pungent and pure Spanish--he had begun his university career teaching the classics of the Golden Age, which he had thoroughly mastered, and traces of this mastery remained in his prose and in the precision and magnificence with which he expressed himself--yet he was not, even remotely, the garrulous professor, an empty-headed wordmonger who listens to himself talk.
Origin of wordmonger
Wordmonger entered English in the late 1500s. The word monger means "a dealer in or trader of a commodity" or "a person who is involved with something in a petty or contemptible way" and it is frequently used in combination, as in the terms fishmonger and gossipmonger.