A Word to the Wise

Name two words that are both fictitious and sound alike:
1) Scaramanga
2) Scaremonger

Although both words are in common usage, neither are "real" words. Scaramanga was the title character in the James Bond film "The Man With The Golden Gun". Scaremonger is an inaccurate accusation-word often used to denounce people with whom someone disagrees ("So-and-so is nothing but a scaremonger"). Let me clarify the usage this way, if you want a classic English meal, ______ & chips, do you go to a fry-monger or a fish-monger? Right, you go to a fish-monger to get your fish which you fry. In the same way, we would say that a person scares someone to create fear. That person would be a fear-monger (fearmonger), not a scare-monger - whatever monger means. (I need to look that up sometime.)

Thus, a fearmonger (hypen optional) is someone who trades in fear by scaring people (like the chip people trade in fishies by frying them... you get my point). The gist of the term means that some is peddling fear for some reason, for some purpose. Usually that purpose is to gain advantage or control through offering security from that thing that scares. Obama is scaring the American public with financial collapse unless we trust him and empower him with authority to socialize America and thus thwart the financial calamity that capitalism has wrought. It's an effective sociological tool, just ask the 1930s.

Paranoia on the other hand has aboslutely nothing to do with fearmongering. Quite the contrary, while fearmongers want to trade on the fear of the populace, paranoiacs want to curl up in a ball in a dark corner of a reinforced structure in an undisclosed remote location and avoid all contact with the populace altogether. See, they're different.

I'm a paranoid. I'm not trying to fry anybody's fish. I don't expect to be believed. I don't expect to be followed. I don't attempt to seem plausible at any moment along my paranoid journey. CHS Plan B is just my delusional assessment of a world pussing with the symptoms of imminent decay (imho). If I was a scaremonger, oops, I mean a fearmonger, I'd attempt to be far more persuasive. I'd footnote, cross-reference, and back up every assertion with a hundred authoratative sources. But blogging is just what I do when Bass Pro Shops is closed and I can't buy ammo or between calls from rural real estate agents to whom I have delegated the search for 20 acres with arable land, potable water, and a defensible parapet. The fewer people who agree with my assements herein, the more resources will be left for me after Scaramanga Hits The Fan (hereinafter SHTF). I don't want to scare anyone with fear. I just want to entertain. Really, that's all. Don't believe me. Don't prepare for SHTF. Take your Darwinian chances.

And I'd like to say more now, but the SciFi channel is doing a special on a man with three nipples and I would be scared to death of missing that - I think he's after me.