woo-monger

English

Etymology

woo + monger

Noun

woo-monger (plural woo-mongers)

  1. (informal, derogatory) A proponent of pseudoscientific ideas or practices.
    • 2009 March 13, Kevin Charleston, letter to the editor, Mail & Guardian:
      Wyley resorts to the usual rhetoric of all woo-mongers: that the belief they propose cannot be measured by the standards they apply to all other practices.
    • 2010, Paul Sims, "Cast away", New Humanist, Volume 125, Issue 2, March/April 2010:
      Just as Cohen feels there is no natural party for humanists, Wilson feels there isn’t one for supporters of evidence-based policy. "There are good MPs in all parties, and there are woo-mongers in all parties," he says. “We have to look at each case individually. []
    • 2011 August 30, Bora Zivkovic, “Defining the Journalism vs. Blogging Debate, with a Science Reporting angle”, in Scientific American:
      If a site like Huffington Post, which just got funds to pay reporters, publicly eliminates their pseudoscience, HIV denialist, New Age woo-mongers and hires some real science/nature/medicine reporters instead, it is in a position to do the ‘push strategy’ on science.
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