Put on your hock-dockies, and let's read a little more...

... from the 1869 book, "The Slang Dictionary: Or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and 'Fast' Expressions of High and Low Society."

What do you think of the "Gipsy" origin of "hocus pocus" and the alternative explanation that it's a mockery of the Eucharist? Etymonline buys into the "sham-Latin" explanation, but the OED says "The notion that hocus pocus was a parody of the Latin words used in the Eucharist, rests merely on a conjecture...."

I like these other words. "Hodge" as a clown, "hocus" as drugging a person to rob him, "hocks" as feet," and "hob and nob" as opposed to our "hob-nob." The OED has the oldest definition of "hob-nob" as drinking together, with the oldest example from 1763: "Do I go to hob or nob in white-wine, I am probably told red, is better for my nerves." Wait. That doesn't close it up into the simple "hob-nob." The OED's oldest example of "hob-nob" is from 1828: "I have frequently heard one gentleman, in company, say to another, will you hob-nob with me? When this challenge was accepted, the glasses were instantly filled, and then they made the glasses touch or kiss each other. This gentle striking of the drinking vessels I always supposed explained the term hob-nob." That's interesting, too, because it suggests that clinking glasses was a new thing.

I've never thought about why people clink glasses or how that originated. I see that there was a theory that it had to do with worries the drinks could be poisoned, but Snopes has ruled that false. In the old days, people drank from the same bowl. Having your own drinking vessel is pretty recent, and clinking glasses is — per Snopes! — a way "to compensate for the sense of unity lost"... and maybe people just like the sound of clinked glasses.

As for "Hobson's choice"... you knew what that meant, didn't you? Wikipedia has an article on the subject. I'll just excerpt the John Stuart Mill part:

John Stuart Mill, in his book Considerations on Representative Government, refers to Hobson's choice: "When the individuals composing the majority would no longer be reduced to Hobson's choice, of either voting for the person brought forward by their local leaders, or not voting at all.'

In another of his books, The Subjection of Women, Mill discusses marriage: "Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's choice, 'that or none'.... And if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right in point of mere policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a mistake. They should have never been allowed to receive a literary education."

This isn't tonight's café, so don't go off track. There are a lot of topics here... but not infinite topics.