When Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’, I was willing to believe that the word gloomster existed. Well, it does now.
English abounds in elements like the suffix ster by which new words may be generated. We know without thinking about it that words ending in ster are slightly derogatory. A rhymer is romantic, and a rhymester vulgar.
Originally all sters were feminine. Before the Conquest, a seamestre was a sempstress and a bæcestre a baker. Among the Anglo-Saxons, it seems those trades were followed only by women. Of medieval coinages for trade-pursuits, only spinster survives as solely feminine in application, although its meaning has changed to ‘an unmarried woman’ rather than ‘a spinner of wool’; it is now pejorative too.
A doomster, one might think, is ‘a prophet of doom’, probably self-appointed. The Oxford English Dictionary is ignorant of that sense, not having fully revised its entry for the word since 1897, but lists it as an archaic name for a judge, a variant of deemster or dempster.
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