hack about

Definitions

1. 1

   To be idle

   To 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.”
   • 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.”
2. 2

   To disfigure or damage by hacking

   To disfigure or damage by hacking; to cover with cuts.

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

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