Wordwatch: Hang in there
What a strange expression “hang in there” is! It’s definitely American. A funny thing has happened to it recently. It has got mixed up, understandably, with the British expression “hang on”, meaning to wait for some eventuality or other – I assume it derives from the use of the telephone; compare “to hang up” which used to mean simply to place on a hook, as for example a picture on a wall, and became another telephone-related phrase meaning to terminate a telephone call by replacing the receiver.
“Hang in” (derivation not known to me, though the internet shows us pictures of a kitten stranded on a branch) has come over from the States and connotes greater endurance, patience etc. It’s more specifically an instruction to continue performing an action, or to maintain a state of mind. Now we have “hang on in”: “The best is saved for last … so do hang on in there for that” – film review, The Spectator, October 2021.
And here’s an example from a journalist who writes well but is, as it happens, of American origin: “… those sections of the public with a high enough boredom threshold to hang on in for the detail” (Daily Telegraph, 20 August 2003). To my surprise, I learn from the internet that the compound phrase is specific to the UK. But whatever the sense of the two component idioms, this is surely meaningless.
The writer is perhaps less conscious than a true Brit would be of the redundancy of prepositions. Of course, we move with the times and most of us are hardly aware of distinctions between the two languages (we’ve been absorbing Americanisms for at least two centuries now), and are happy to use this compound, or bastard, expression. Americans love stringing prepositions together, for fun apparently: they speak of “meeting up with” someone instead of simply “meeting” someone. “Just keep going right on along here” could be abbreviated to “keep going” or perhaps “keep going along here”; to “start in on” something, used in British English to be “start on”; and so forth.
“Check out” is another example, though now firmly entrenched in everyday British use. The preposition “out” is usually quite redundant. In the case of supermarket check-outs, it’s justified because the checking is closely allied to finishing a transaction, leaving the building or coming out of the store. More illogical is “call on by”: in June 2016 I noted a news flash in which a celebrity was invited to “call on by” a party. This seems a very odd memory of an Americanism in a completely unsuitable context – “call in (at)” is the usual phrase.
“Overly” is another otiose American expression that is beginning to be common here though it was virtually unknown in Britain even thirty years ago. Once again, a preposition has been accorded a completely new context to convert it into a different part of speech. It is an expansion of “over” as in “over-conscientious”, as though “over” were an adjective which the addition of the suffix “-ly” converts into an adverb. The effect is precisely that – but ‘over’ is not (usually) an adjective and the resultant hybrid is ugly and unnecessary.
But who am I to spoil your upcoming Easter with niggling comments like these? Go ahead (another American prepositional phrase) and do your utmost to enjoy what I hope will be a peaceful and healthy break from the dismal news we’re surrounded by now.