hobbyhorse

<font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica"> <p> <strong> <font color="#000066">Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 25, 2023 is:</font> </strong> </p> <p> <strong>hobbyhorse</strong> &#149; \HAH-bee-horss\&nbsp; &#149; <em>noun</em><br /> <p><em>Hobbyhorse</em> usually refers to a topic that someone dwells on, returning to again and again, especially in conversation.</p> <p>// The so-called “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Curse-of-the-Bambino">Curse of the Bambino</a>” was a favorite <em>hobbyhorse</em> of my Red Sox-loving grandfather until the team finally won the World Series in 2004.</p> <p><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hobbyhorse">See the entry ></a></p> </p> <p> <strong>Examples:</strong><br /> <p>“In the foreword to her book <em>A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century</em>, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world. ... Her book was published in 1978 and won the National Book Award for History, but in the nearly half century since, the Middle Ages have been a common <em>hobbyhorse</em> for people of all political persuasions who suspect modernity might be leading us down the <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primrose%20path">primrose path</a>, especially as the internet has become a more central and inescapable element of daily life.” — Amanda Mull, <em>The Atlantic</em>, 6 May 2022</p> </p> <p> <strong>Did you know?</strong><br /> <p>Does your favorite hobby involve a horse? Whether it does or not, the word <em>hobby</em> is undeniably equine: it’s a shortening of the older term <em>hobbyhorse</em>. And in a strange etymological twist, the word <em>hobbyhorse</em> is itself a product of an older word <em>hobby</em> that in the 1400s referred to a small or medium-sized horse, especially one that moved at a gentle pace. By the mid 1500s, <em>hobby horse</em> was being used to refer to a horse costume