The word horbgorble is not to be found in the great Oxford Dictionary. It is a good Scots word and travelled to the United States in the 18th century, where it survives to the present day. A friend of mine from Philadelphia recently sent me a newspaper cutting in which a letter-writer bemoaned the fact that Mr Gore hadn't the sense to use the undoubted charisma of Mr Clinton to gain more votes. "Gore spent his time horbgorbling around ineffectively", the writer claimed, meaning that he travelled about in a feckless manner, fumbling, or "mooching", as we'd say here.
I am indebted to the researches of the late Ivor Brown, a Scots journalist who, apart from editing the Observer during the second World War, wrote well about words. A correspondent who asked him about horbgorble recollected the trial of a Caithness man for alleged assault on a servant girl. It was a strange business. The case was brought not by the girl, but by her employer, who was, he felt, in loco parentis.
There was no suggestion of rape, but there was a suggestion of sexual misdemeanour, even though the girl was over the age of consent; so the magistrates asked her what exactly had happened. The lass explained that her boyfriend was only horbgorblin' when the employer came on the scene. This explanation was readily understood by the court; the employer was told he was a meddling auld fool; the case was dismissed.
Well, I can see how an elder of a severe kirk would see in horbgorbling a stage on the road to ruin and to that which Robert Burns called houghmagandy. This marvellous fanciful formation for fornication may be from the noun hough, in Scotland the back part of the thigh, plus the adjective canty, gleesome, lively. Of the Holy Fair, Burns wrote: "There's some are fou o'love divine/And some are fou o'brandy,/And monie jobs that day begin/May end in houghmagandie/Some ither day".
Nabokov was, it seems, fascinated with this great Scots word. He used it more than once. This is from Pale Fire, in 1962: "She would have preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome houghmagandy with the wench."
Has houghmagandy reached this sainted isle? Indeed it has, I'm glad to say. It travelled with the planters across the Moyle and can be heard in Antrim and Down. C.I. Macafee has it in her Concise Ulster Dictionary.