My father looks at me as if I were a cricket match. We are on a video call, in different continents. Behind him is a closed window through whose glass I can see the light of the Indian autumn. I have just turned 49. He perhaps wants some kind of confirmation of this from my face. His voice, so loud that our neighbours consoled us for days after we were scolded as children, suddenly drops into a whisper: “Aami tomakay khoob miss korchhi (I am missing you a lot),” he says in Bangla, the word “miss” in English.
My father has never said such a thing to me before – it is possible that he is as surprised as I am. Though English words often entered our conversations in Bangla, the word “miss” is new to his vocabulary. As I heard him struggle to hold back his emotions, I wondered whether he might have ever told me that he missed me had we spoken only in Bangla. What is the phrase for “I miss you” in the Indian languages?
My mother asks about my plans for the day. I’ll “hang out” with a few people, I say. I try to think of an equivalent phrase in Bangla; I can’t.
I don’t remember using or hearing “let’s hang” in the first few decades of my life. I don’t think it had only to do with my life in a provincial Indian town. The expression wasn’t ubiquitous. “Hang”, which probably derived from the Old Norse “hengja”, meaning to “suspend” or the proto-Germanic “hangana”, has had a new life in the last couple of decades. We had been conditioned into its life mostly as an intransitive verb: Hanging a painting on a wall; lights that hang from the ceiling or smoke that hung in a room; hanging one’s head in shame; how people hung around persistently in our thoughts; the inability to reach an unanimous decision, a sense that would perhaps become the basis for a phrase such as “hung parliament”; to stop responding, our desperation when the computer hangs; the possibility of being captured, made evident in the idiomatic, such as “hang your rook”; and, occasionally, the horror of hearing that a criminal had
been hanged.
As a transitive verb, “hang” became slightly aggressive, particularly on a sports field; it began to be used to damn as well. When we met it as a noun, it was in a slightly changed and more relaxed form – as in a “hanger”, where we hung our clothes. Sometimes, as when it was treated literally, it became something akin to judgement about form: “The skirt has a nice hang”.
I wonder whether it is this idea of the comfort and bagginess of the hanger that led to the sense of loitering and idling in the expression “hang around” and “hang out”. The precariousness of “hanging by a thread” or “hanging by the eyelids” or “hang in there” or “hang onto your hat” had disappeared in “hang out”. The savouring of that freedom and joy that one derived from hanging out, for instance, could also be experienced in the idiomatic sense of having no hangups. It was perhaps to be rid of that nervousness or anxiety that one also hung up on a phone call.
The need to have a sense of understanding of one’s circumstances beats in the expression “I now have a hang of …”. The restraint and nervousness of “hang back” from the late 16th century has been replaced by the lack of inhibition of “let it all hang out” in the 1960s.
Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year, “hallucinate”, has added a new meaning relating to the anxieties around AI to its usual connotation. As with “hallucinate”, it is a wonder to discover the history of both human anxiety and the craving for freedom in the changing character of the usage of “hang” and its various phrasal verbs over a millennium. Though “hang around”, with its sense of idling (think of the “No Idling” signs in American cities) is first recorded as an American English expression in 1828, it was only in the 1950s that “hang out” became teenage slang, and soon after, a noun: “Hangout”. It has been abbreviated into both verb and noun since: One “hangs” with people now; if one likes their company, they are good “hangs”.
Linguists have noticed that while “hang” as a verb has been in constant use, “hang” as a noun fell out of use, its graph dipping all through the 20th century after which its use has again peaked.
Silly as it might sound, I sometimes wonder whether it was the invention of a sport such as hang gliding, which brought the freedom and liveliness of air into human lives, that has given this new youthfulness to the life of “hang” in our times. Like “miss”, it has resisted translation. I shudder to imagine the fear on my mother’s face had I used the Bangla or Hindi equivalents of “hang” – “jhultey jachhi” or “jhulney ja rahi hoon”.
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor of creative writing, Ashoka University.Views are personal
