Mind your language

Sounding, in this respect alone, like a High Court judge, my husband asked: ‘What are HobNobs?’

Sounding, in this respect alone, like a High Court judge, my husband asked: ‘What are HobNobs?’ For once I felt like agreeing with the assumption behind the question: that there are names for foodstuffs that we cannot be expected to keep up with. Of course I knew what a HobNob was, though I admit to being vaguer on cheese string, or is it string cheese? Veronica is past the age for such things, and none of us ever saw a Turkey Twizzler.

Only when leafing (or paging as some writers suddenly prefer to call it) through the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins (edited by Julia Cresswell, £9.99) did I learn that HobNobs were invented by McVitie’s in 1985. Yesterday. Dr Cresswell is of the opinion that it was the convivial associations of hobnob that attracted the biscuit people. Yet the first connotation in my mind is the pejorative one of mixing familiarly with those of a higher status. The verb is used of other people: ‘You have been hobnobbing.’ Never: ‘I have been hobnobbing,’

A more innocent period in the history of hobnob saw it embodying the easy familiarity of those enjoying a drink together. Originally it was a toast: ‘Hob and nob,’ implying either ‘give and take’, or ‘have and have not’. Yet its sound conjures up associations not only of nobbliness, a virtue in some kinds of biscuit, but also of the rustic hobbinol. Edith Sitwell in Façade lent heavily upon such associations of sound. ‘That hobnailed goblin, the bobtailed Hob / Said: “It is time I began to rob, / For Strawberries bob hobnob with the pearls / Of cream like the curls of the dairy girls”.’