This article is a preview from the Spring 2018 edition of New Humanist

hub: “solid centre of a wheel”, 1640s

The government is setting up “Literacy Hubs” to improve children’s reading, in line with “Maths Hubs” set up several years ago. Followers over the last 30 years of local-government and business-speak will have met hubs sprouting up everywhere , along with “silos” and “initiatives” being “rolled out”. Some people in education tell me that they’re not allowed to talk of detentions – the delinquent students go to the Hub; others have told me of sex clinics, libraries, bus stations and council offices all being called hubs.

Anyone who has footled around with wheels on cars or bikes will be familiar with what the metaphor is based on. This use of “hub” comes from the 17th century when referring to the kinds of wheels that wheelwrights made. No one – not even the great Oxford English Dictionary – is certain where it comes from. Some claim that it’s just a version of “hob”. Certainly in the early 16th century “hob” was spelled “hubbe”. By the early 19th century, a nice idiom had emerged in the US, “up to the hub” – a reference to the way the wheels on carts and carriages would sink into the mud up as far as the hub, and so as a phrase, it came to mean a full measure: “not by halves”, and the like. By the end of the century another idiomatic use emerged when journalists could refer to people in wartime being loyal from “hub to tyre”.

None of this deals with the question of how it was that a word for the centre of a cartwheel should become so fashionable today amongst those who design our lives. Is it the snappy, single-syllable quality of the word, with its non-nonsense, front-of-the-mouth closing consonant “b”? Is it the link the word has with machines and technology, turning our mundane, messy social organisations into something modern? If you believe, as some do, that a good deal of language innovation is by “analogy” (that is by imitating or adapting what has come before), then we might bring into the discussion words like “nub”, “sub”, “cub” and “dub” which, as the jargon has it, “connote” feelings of things being essential, young or even musical in a hip sort of a way.

That’s it from the Glossary Hub for this issue