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From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-10-25:

"Bond also expects his ideal woman to be able to make a bearnaise sauce as well as she makes love. Presumably not at the same time. Although I of course can. And do. Frequently." -- Joanna Lumley, actress, presenting 'Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began' (BBC1, Sunday 19th October 2008), quoted by Sam Wollaston in The Guardian.

[ http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/oct/20/television-television]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

Driving on the Capital Beltway this afternoon, the thought struck me that a word we don't use often enough nowadays is 'monger'. We have fishmongers and fearmongers (and as a bandmate pointed out, ironmongers), but not a whole lot of other mongers, which is a shame, since it's a perfectly good combining word and a reasonably good word on its own.

That is to say, weapons dealers should be 'armsmongers', Barnes and Noble would be 'bookmongers', the New York Times would be a 'newsmonger', Amazon and Google and other suppliers of 'cloud' data storage are 'bitmongers', we could call footwear salesmen 'shoemongers', pharmacists would be 'drugmongers', and politicians could be 'liemongers'.

Anyone care to guess what I observed while driving that sparked this chain of thought?