hack about

present singular third person hacks about · participle present hacking about · participle past hacked about · past hacked about

1. UKcolloquialintransitiveTo be idle; to waste time; to socialize.

   “So Madam has taken Miss amongst the Parlez-vous! By Jove, if she had been my wife, she should have trained the filly at home. She’ll run none the better for all this hacking about.”

   1829, Ann Thicknesse, chapter 5, in The School of Fashion, volume 1, page 107

   2 more examples

   What a frightfully spotty blouse! He could not think where he had seen it. Then he remembered that it was Lilia’s. She had brought it “to hack about in” at Sawston, and had taken it to Italy beacuse “in Italy anything does.”

   1905, E. M. Forster, chapter 6, in Where Angels Fear to Tread, published 1920, page 106

   Here they had started so well, sixty years of solid achievement—and now different people were hacking about with different ideas and different toys, arguing and working against each other, bringing ever more powerful and expensive methods to bear, but with ever less coordination.

   1993, Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

   Synonyms: hack around

2. UKtransitiveTo disfigure or damage by hacking; to cover with cuts.

   Even more sedate accounts agree that, like Thomas Cromwell, she was hacked about by a second-string executioner.

   2017, Hilary Mantel, “How Do We Know Her? The Secrets of Margaret Pole”, in Mantel Pieces, published 2020

   2 more examples

   All Paris now crowds to see “Barbe Bleue,” an opéra-bouffe […]. The dear old story of “Blue Beard” has been taken by Messieurs Meilhar and L. Halévy, who have ruthlessly hacked it about, until nothing of the original remains[…]

   1866, Alphonse du Helder, “At Home and Abroad: Dramatic Notes”, in Once a Week, volume 1, number 20, page 543

   It’s true that they have occasionally damaged the rare shrubs by hacking them about—they come through here trying to get a short cut to the Ferry across the river.

   1956, Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly, page 35

   Synonyms: mangle