(HOB-nob)

Means: To rub elbows socially, especially with people more important than you.

Etymology: It started as a drinking word. "Hob or nob" and "hob and nob" were things you said in the 1700s when two people toasted each other or took turns buying rounds. It goes back to an old dialect phrase, hab nab, "have or have not." From there it came to mean getting chummy over drinks, and eventually just mingling with the big shots.

"He hobnobbed with the club pro for one round and now he won't shut up about his swing plane."

In the early 1940s, GM design boss Harley Earl and his stylists got a look at Lockheed's P-38 Lightning, a fighter with twin tail booms. The little fins on the 1948 Cadillac came straight from it. Over the next decade fins grew with the jet age, and the 1959 Cadillac took them as far as they ever went: towering points with twin bullet taillights, like a rocket parked in the driveway. The same look showed up on toasters, jukeboxes, and diner signs: chrome, swept angles, and anything that looked like it could fly.

That metal band holding the eraser on a pencil is a ferrule (FAIR-ul). Same word for the metal collar on a pool cue, a paintbrush, or the tip of a cane. It comes from the Latin viriola, "little bracelet," later bent toward ferrum, "iron." A Philadelphia stationer named Hymen Lipman got the first patent for a pencil with an attached eraser in 1858. In 1875 the Supreme Court threw it out, ruling that sticking two things together that already existed isn't an invention.

Sex after 50 is like the free breakfast at a Hampton Inn. You're glad it's included, it never looks like the picture, and it's over by 9:30.

I've got a neck but no head, shoulders but no arms, and a punt, but I've never played football. I wear a cap or a cork. What am I?

Answer in tomorrow's issue.