hack about

hack about (third-person singular simple present hacks about, present participle hacking about, simple past and past participle hacked about)

1. (UK, colloquial, intransitive) To be idle; to waste time; to socialize.

   Synonym: hack around

   • 1829, Ann Thicknesse, chapter 5, in The School of Fashion‎^[1], volume 1, page 107:

     “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.”

   • 1905, E. M. Forster, chapter 6, in Where Angels Fear to Tread‎^[2], published 1920, page 106:

     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.”

   • 1993, Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars:

     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.

2. (UK, transitive) To disfigure or damage by hacking; to cover with cuts.

   Synonym: mangle

   • 1866, Alphonse du Helder, “At Home and Abroad: Dramatic Notes”, in Once a Week‎^[3], volume 1, number 20, page 543:

     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 […]

   • 1956, Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly‎^[4], page 35:

     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.

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

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