Sounding, in this respect alone, like a High Court judge, my husband asked: ‘What are HobNobs?’
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Iain Mansfield
Bridget Phillipson wants no alternatives to expose her education mistakes
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.
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