Spot the Frippet: hub.

 You find hubs in the middles of things. 

It's usually a wheel:

photo of Opel wheel hub  by Cschirp

photo of a cartwheel by Sarang

but it might be an air-travel network:

photo of Heathrow Airport by Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz (Mariordo)

or any kind of electronic network:

photo of a media hub by mastermag.

Hub is also now a fashionable word to describe anywhere where people come together in order to cooperate. Yes, that's right, they used to be called offices or classrooms or churches.

I probably should have called this blog The Word Hub, really. 

But never mind.

Spot the Frippet: hub. This feels as if it should be a really old word, especially when you consider that wheels have had hubs for thousands of years, but it isn't. It is probably linked in some way to the word hob (as in oven) and that only dates from the 1500s. Hob used to be hubbe, but no one knows where it came from before that.