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
• Powell & Co are now eyeing consumer service prices as the latest hobgoblin to hound.
  — Gary Drenik, Forbes, 19 Dec. 2022
• 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
• The primrose path to relevance has been strewn with injuries and other baseball hobgoblins.
  — Richard Fitch, Cincinnati.com, 27 Apr. 2018
• God has His own Treblinka, with devils, hobgoblins, demons, angels of death.
  — Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2018
• 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
• Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote.
  — Robert Krier, sandiegouniontribune.com, 7 June 2018
• 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
• 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
• Resistance is the hobgoblin of antiviral medicine, even with antivirals as effective as Paxlovid.
  — Jason Mast, STAT, 29 May 2022
• Because consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, or something.
  — Tory Newmyer, Washington Post, 17 Oct. 2017
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Alternate realities have become hobgoblins of our time.
  — Carolina A. Miranda, latimes.com, 13 Apr. 2018

Last Updated: 3 Dec 2024