Definition:
: someone who caters to and often exploits the weaknesses of others
About the Word:
Pander has undergone a bit of what linguists and other wordy types like to call "pejoration," the process by which a word's meaning and connotation goes downhill.
The initial meaning in English was in reference to someone who acted as a go-between for a pair of lovers, a facilitator of romance. The word entered our language in this sense as an alteration for the name of a character (Pandare) in Chaucer's classic poem Troilus and Criseyde; Pandare assisted the lovers in this poem in their romance. However, soon after the word began to take on slightly...less noble shades.
Pander began to be used as a term for a pimp, or a person who procured the services of a prostitute. After this it broadened to include any person who helped satisfy any one of a number of questionable urges.
Example:
"To finish this work of malignity, the stage had lent all its splendid apparatus of mischief, the shop has been converted into a show-box of temptations, and its owner into a pander of iniquity." — Timothy Dwight, Theology, Explained and Defended, 1824
