How to Use hobgoblin in a Sentence
hobgoblin
noun-
The witches used some as nests, too, leaving them for hobgoblins to sleep in.
—New York Times, 21 May 2018
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Nothing says Happy Halloween like a scary hobgoblin, all scowls and just looking for trouble.
—Woman's Day Staff, Woman's Day, 9 Sep. 2019
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The primrose path to relevance has been strewn with injuries and other baseball hobgoblins.
—Richard Fitch, Cincinnati.com, 27 Apr. 2018
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God has His own Treblinka, with devils, hobgoblins, demons, angels of death.
—Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2018
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Evidently, consistency really is the hobgoblin of small minds—the heirs to Scalia and Robert Bork don’t bother themselves with it.
—John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 26 June 2022
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote.
—Robert Krier, sandiegouniontribune.com, 7 June 2018
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Column B would be urban fantasy, as the villains are powerful demons from another astral plane and there are other species (hobgoblins, etc.) in play as well.
—Clay Kallam, The Mercury News, 9 June 2017
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This fascination tells us more about ourselves than Sosa, who is demonstrating that foolish consistency said to be the hobgoblin of little minds.
—Phil Rosenthal, chicagotribune.com, 29 June 2018
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Resistance is the hobgoblin of antiviral medicine, even with antivirals as effective as Paxlovid.
—Jason Mast, STAT, 29 May 2022
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Because consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, or something.
—Tory Newmyer, Washington Post, 17 Oct. 2017
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Her method: Start with the ostensible foreground — a lunch or a visit or a recipe for lemon drizzle cake — then introduce the emotional hobgoblins that throw the characters rewardingly off-kilter.
—New York Times, 8 June 2017
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Such hobgoblins of Hamilton’s imagination bear an eerie resemblance to the current occupant of the White House, with his tweets, double talk and inflammatory rhetoric at rallies.
—Ron Chernow, Twin Cities, 21 Oct. 2019
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Every year around the holidays, the most easily agitated people online return to a particular seasonal hobgoblin: decrying Starbucks as an agent in the War on Christmas.
—Luke O'Neil, Esquire, 10 Mar. 2017
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Start with the ostensible foreground — perhaps a lunch or a visit from a svelte refrigerator repairman or a recipe for lemon drizzle cake — then introduce the emotional hobgoblins that throw the characters rewardingly off-kilter.
—Elinor Lipman, New York Times, 2 June 2017
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Alternate realities have become hobgoblins of our time.
—Carolina A. Miranda, latimes.com, 13 Apr. 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hobgoblin.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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