Jim wonders first, what the verb 'hang out' means, and asks for specific
examples of this activity.  Is it a mobile or stationery activity, and can
it be done by one person or does it require company?
Second, can it be used in all tenses.  Please fill in the following:
I often hang out at....
I am hanging out at .....
I will hang out at ...
I will be hanging out at ...
I was hanging out at....
I hung out yesterday at ....
I used to hang out at ....
I have hung out at....
(In other words, are any of the above impossible?).
Must the verb always be followed by a place, or a co-hanger-out, or can you
say something like 'I like to hang out'.
What exactly does someone do when hanging out?  Talk?  Watch cars go by?
Play music?  Drink coffee?  Do something constructive?  Homework?
Does one hang out while seated, standing, riding in a car?

44 responses total.

It's mobil or stationary.  It requires, is my experience, at least two
people.  You must have someone with which to hang out. (as opposed to
"hanging", which one can do alone.) 
I often hang out at....  the bowling alley
I am hanging out at .....  the bowling alley 
I will hang out at ...  the bowling alley 
I will be hanging out at ... the bowling alley 
I was hanging out at.... the bowling alley 
I hung out yesterday at .... the bowling alley 
I used to hang out at .... the bowling alley 
I have hung out at.... the bowling alley 
(No, none of the above are impossible.)
No, the verb can be used with a person, "I often hang out with Joey," or
with both. "I often hang out at the bowling alley with Joey."  You can
indeed say "I like to hang out."  Hanging out is not a specific
activity.  As a matter of fact, it's a lack of specific activity.  If
you say, "Lets go bowling." then you are not hanging out.  You are
bowling.  However, if you say "Let's hang out at the bowling alley." and
then decide to go bowling, you are still hanging out.  It is a
spontaneous sort of thing, go with the flow.  It frequently involves
drinking, although not necessarily alcohol.  One usually does not do
anything constructive while hanging out, because hanging out is for
killing time, and results from a mood where one usually doesn't want to
do anything constructive.  Hanging out can be done seated or standing,
but usually not in a car.  If you are in a car doing similar activities,
you are likely crusing, not hanging out.  It usually implies a more or
less stable location, although you can decide to go elsewhere.  

I don't agree that one person can't hang out.

 I'd never heard that a person couldn't hang out alone either.  I think of
it as meaning spending time somewhere (hanging out downtown), or with somebody
(hanging out with Fred) in a fairly informal way.

Hanging out is also associated with loitering...it just sounds better.  ;-)
Dan has it when he says that hanging out isn't really a specific activity.
To hang out means wait around and observe other happenings until you decide
to become part of the action.  Another example would be "hanging out at the
mall".  This usually insinuates that you are simply browsing or walking while
waiting for a movie to start or whatever, whereas shopping at the mall is not
considered hanging out.  Hanging out is also a kind of lazy activity.  To walk
around a mall doesn't take a lot of effort, you don't really have a plan, and
you take notice of more things.  Shopping has a plan, a purpose, a
destination.

FWIW, I hate shopping AND hanging out at the mall.  It was just easy to
illustrate.  =)

        "Hanging out" covers a lot of ground - more or less any real amount
of time spent in a place that is not purely productive.  It doesn't have to
be wasted time, but the implication exists.

So if we are fixing radios at Kiwanis every day, we cannot tell someone that
we hang out at Kiwanis frequently?

While that's often the implication, it's not necessarily the case.  I'd say you
could claim that you hang out at Kiwanis.

For me at least, 'hanging out' generally doesn't involve doing anything
horribly productive.  I would consider fixing radios, or working, rather
productive, and thus not hanging out.  As someone else said, it's kind
of the period where you decide- spur of the moment to do something, or
just are there... Like I can say I was hanging out with Jiffer the other
night, that doesn't tell you exactly what we did, but it gives the
impression that it wasn't anything exactly productive.

If we are required to be some place, is that hanging out?  If we are at work
but goofing off, is that hanging out?

What are people's favorite hanging-out locations and activities?

        Fixing radios sounds pretty productive to me. :)  Now if you're sort
of fixing radios for ten or fifteen minutes out of the hour, and talking or
playing around for the rest, then it'd be closer to the definition of "hanging
out" that I understand.

I think that "hanging out" replaced the earlier "hanging around".

        The fixing  could be impromptu goof-off fixing,
        and you could be  hanging out with some radios and tools.

This response has been erased.

        One could not help but imagine a possible relation
        to surfing's "hanging five" and "hanging ten" as
        pointed examples of nonchalant grace. But the
        online Merriam-Webster dates "hang around", 
        as in aimless loitering, amazingly, to the
        1830's. Further, the tradesman's "hanging out"
        a shingle is dated to the 14th century, and seems
        related to acquired skill, as in "getting the hang"
        of a certain activity.

        But we must delve further into the presumably
        Germanic roots of the main verb "hang", as in
        what a bat does.

        We would be remiss to also not include "hangout",
        a place for spending time, dated by m-w to 1893.

        Wish I knew a better site to look up etymologies.
        Sure enough, old English/German "hangen" is in the
        ancestry.

        Further one cannot ignore the short form,
        to simply hang, as a more current emphasis
        on the leisurely focus of the activity. Also
        time or duration is always involved, one
        cannot hang for an instant, a painting hung
        on the wall must stay there, and we speak
        of "hang time".

        I gotta go.

Can someone explain the meaning of the intransitive verb 'to chill'?

It means to calm down, in some instances... Like "dude, chill out!" if
someone is getting over-excited about something, or if a parental type
is throwing a fit cause kid was out til three in the morning- kid
(foolish ones) might tell the parent to 'chill out.' So pretty much
it's calm down, or relax.  Using the relax idea I could say "I was 
chillin with Joe last night" meaning we were hanging out. <laughs>
Or just watching tv and relaxing... something along those lines.

Places I "hang out":  Boogie's All-Night Cafe (sit and drink cocoa for hours),
the fountain on campus (sit and talk), a2 is considered a hang-out since I
go there and just kinda walk around with people without doing much, the arb
is good for sitting down and relaxing on a blanket, and some others.

   i work (do productive, income-earning things) at ans.  i hang out
(do not necessarily productive, recreational/conversational things)
at denny's ferquently.  i hardly ever get riled up enough that my
friends or co-workers have to tell me to chill out.  :)

Can you hang out in your own home, or does it
alway have to be somewhere else?  

I define it as someplace else.  Being home is just, well...being home.  =)
You can hang out at *other* houses, though.  

I dunno, I'll say "I hung out at home instead of going to the party." 

I heard Mick Jagger say "Cool out" in an attempt to soothe an 
angry, pushing crowd at a concert on TV, in the 1960s.

   hanging out can be done at home, depending on what you're doing.  if
i'm doing housework or making stuff it's not hanging out.  playing video
games, reading and drinking coffee, surfing the web, dinking around with
other stuff all count as hanging out.

(and that should have been "frequently" in resp:18.  i can spell, i just
can't type.  ;)

ack... spelling patrol is slacking off... >:)

Jim asks if he can chill out in a hot tub.
Please define 'dinking around' and give more examples of usage.

   hmmm..."dinking around" is a term i use a lot but hardly ever hear
from anyone else.  generally it means to fool with, play around with,
experiment on, and generally try to think like an engineer when
attempting some task you have either never done before or have done so
infrequently that you don't remember how you did it last time.

   "the vcr wouldn't record, so i dinked around with it for a while and
now it works."

   "dave and i spent three days dinking around with wendy's car before
we finally figured out that the fuel line was hiding inside a frame
rail."

   "after dinking around with the computer long enough, i figured out
that i had to jumper the modem for com4."

   "the recipe was all right, but i dinked around with some different
ingredients and now i like my version better."

   as far as i know, it's quite possible to chill out in a hot tub.

   beeswing, i can be the on-call spelling patrol if you like.  :)

A synonym for "dinking around" is "puttering around."

Yeah, they both seem like they would work.

chill out has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with
attitude.  Kinda like hanging out.  The attitude is not one of "okay,
let's do this, and then this and then this" but rather "hey, wanna 
do this?" "eh, why not" kinda thing.

I've been in the hot tub, chilling out with friends. On a separate incident,
same hot tub, same friends, but what was being done was heating up. 
 
In the first case, there was no specific course of action beyond relaxing.
In the second, there was a DEFINITE specific course of action.

Oy....

Jim finds that he thinks better in a hot tub, it does something to the speed
of conduction of neural impulses.  (It also frequently puts him to sleep and
he wakes up in a cold tub).  He advises people never to peel grapefruits in
the tub, there is some oil in the skin of the grapefruit that gets into the
water and he had a bad reaction to it.  What do other people do in the tub
besides fall asleep?

Now we can't peel grapefruits in the hot tub? Damn. There's my weekend shot.

<mooncat wonders if she should ask WHY someone would be peeling in the
hot tub>

I read in the tub.

Jim gets dehydrated while boiling himself in the tub and instead of drinking
a quart of water decided to eat a few grapefruits.
Do you have a holder to keep the book dry?
We cannot listen to tapes in the bathroom, the moisture makes either the tape
or the head too slippery to work properly or maybe the capstan or rubber
roller gets wet from condensation.  Are there VCRs that will work in a steamy
room?  Do people watch TV while bathing?

A VCR would probably suffer a similar problem.  I'd suggest putting the tape
deck outside the bathroom, and just the speakers inside.

I generally peel before I get... yeah, anyway.

(shameless promotion = on) Since we're all discussing it, join hangout 
(shameless promotion = off)

Keesan- I'm the book holder. ;)  I always keep a towel handy and don't
take in books that I can't replace.  In my bathroom here I generally 
turn the fan on so that the room doesn't get too steamy.  Sometimes I
listen to tapes or cds when I'm in there, but it's more common for
my roomie to listen to music while she's taking a bath.

The people who designed my bathroom made it woefully devoid of outlets.

(That's probably smart...especially near a tub)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss