At Murray’s Cheese in Grand Central Station, the workers who sell cheese are called cheesemongers. The store’s opening up a new section to sell cold cuts, and workers there are looking for more appetizing term than meatmonger. (Meat-R-Maids? Never mind.) Martha and Grant try to help. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Meatmonger”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Jenny from New York.
Hiya, Jenny. How are you?
Hello, Jenny.
I’m excellent. How are you?
Doing wonderfully well. What’s up?
Well, my question is actually about my Manhattan job. I am a cheesemonger at Murray’s Cheese, and we’re opening up a new charcuterie store in the Grand Central Terminal, and it’s called Murray’s Real Salami, or will be. It’s opening in a couple weeks.
And behind the counter at the cheese shop, we’re called cheesemongers. So the idea was just to follow that form and call the people who will be working at salami the meatmongers. But after some Google searches, we found that it has some rather unsavory connotations.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get over there.
Yeah, what should we be called?
So do these people have uniforms and little buttons that say cheesemonger?
No, not so much, but we do have signs that will reference it, or we can say, you know, if I’m, for instance, in the front organizing some packages and someone’s asking me about a particular type of cheese, I can say, oh, just, you know, ask one of our cheesemongers up at the counter. So it’s not really something that’s going to be plastered everywhere, but we do like to have some sort of title for it.
I see. Okay.
And meatmonger isn’t going to work. There is something vaguely pornographic about that.
Yes, yes.
I did a Google search and found a man given to wenching. To wenching. To wenching.
So salami monger isn’t going to work either.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
Okay, so you need something completely different. People react okay to the cheese monger?
Yeah, they do. Like sometimes they snicker and they think it’s a little funny. Sometimes I say I’m a cheese mongeress.
Mongeress.
But yeah, cheese monger is okay. I think cheesemonger and fishmonger, I’m not really sure, aside from like warmonger. One of our mongers still exists out there, but I think it’s a common enough word that people don’t get too freaked out by it.
Right.
Okay.
But you need a better word for the people who work with the meat.
Exactly.
How about flesh trader?
Oh, no, that doesn’t work. If anything, that’s worse.
Okay.
Well, you said you work for a charcuterie, right?
Right, right.
And this is the French term for a place that handles meats, deli meats, not like a butcher.
Exactly, right. They’re all cooked and cured.
Yeah, the cured and cured, exactly. The seasoned stuff, the stuff that you would make sandwiches or crudités out of for little hors d’oeuvres, right? An etymological relative of carnage and carcass, I would just throw in.
Then what about the French term, charcuterie? Is that too pretentious?
I don’t know, because another thing is we really like to try to avoid being pretentious. So we’re calling it Murray’s Real Salami. And we did, we have talked around the idea of sulimieri, like the Italian one, but it’s such a mouthful. And also I’m not really sure how we would do plural because it’s probably, I think sulimieri is singular and then it would be sulimieri plural or sulimieri. It sounds weird.
What is the word?
Salomieri.
Okay, and so meter maid spelled with an A wouldn’t work.
Yes.
I’m leaning toward Grant’s original suggestion, charcutier, right?
Charcutier, yeah, that’s kind of nice. It does flow rather nicely, and it would kind of balance the, I guess, the country mix, since we do have things from all over the world. It’s called salami, which is more of an Italian kind of thing.
Charcutier.
Jenny, how about meat concierge?
Meat concierge.
Oh, that sounds nice. Do you think?
I was just joking. This is harder than I thought. I do like, you know, kind of trying to work with butcher and kind of make it, you know, give it a bit more finesse. But cured meat butcher sounds a little clunky. But it does kind of carry that same, like, I don’t know, rustic charm as monger.
You know, we’ve given you some avenues of exploration, and I would be interested to find out how this turns out. And further, I bet we’ll get some emails from listeners, and if we get something super-duper, we’ll forward it on to you, all right?
Great. Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Okay. Good luck.
Okay. Thank you. Bye.
If you can think of something to call someone who handles the sale and preparation of cooked and cured meats in a fancy shop, let us know. We’d love to hear about it.
The number to call is 1-877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
