Why do some people use "how's it hanging?" as greeting? What is "it" referring to?
asked Jan 22, 2013 at 9:29
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2Commonly used as a greeting in HS in rural Massachusetts in the '64 to '6 period, clearly with the sexual implication.– user52987Commented Sep 28, 2013 at 3:27
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2To give you a clue, the same idiom in German is "wie steht's", literally "how is it standing?".– Zsolt SzilagyCommented Dec 7, 2022 at 10:32
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5 Answers
As with up in your other question, hang has many meanings, not all of them related to an act of suspension. For example, hang out can certainly mean ‘place garments on a washing line to dry’, but it can also mean, among other things,’reside, lodge or live’.
As Alan B suggests, How’s it hanging? may well have the genital origin that Partridge attributes to it. In answer to your comment about its application to women, I would guess that that is rather beside the point, as I suspect it’s an expression almost entirely confined to men.
It is often used in English without any very specific meaning, as in It’s raining. In How’s it hanging? it refers to life in general.
answered Jan 22, 2013 at 9:53
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1While there may well be a gender bias here, I don't feel that how's it hanging is unheard of with women. I think that it's gained enough independence as a phrase to be used regardless of its origins. Commented Jan 22, 2013 at 9:57
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5
Well, it's referring to the penis obviously.
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3Well, if she's familiar with the phrase she'll answer you. Either that or she'll demand that you remove your underwear so she can check.– Alan BCommented Jan 22, 2013 at 9:50
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3@cartogram: Don't be a boob. :^) (If you click on the link provided by Alan in his answer, there's an answer there to your question.) As a side note, I don't know how "obvious" this reference is. After all, I've heard and used these rather often – hang on, hang tight, hang out, hang loose – but I never really thought about body parts.– J.R.Commented Jan 22, 2013 at 11:13
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5Certainly where I grew up (Ireland) and also in the UK almost everyone would assume that the origin of the phrase pertains to the male sexual organ. The accepted reply to the question among my peers was: "Long, loose and full of juice."– Alan BCommented Jan 22, 2013 at 14:46
In 1964 at the very end of the school term in mid June, I was walking down a long hall way alone when from the other end of the hall came a member of the schools ruling clique. This fellow and I had been friends years before in middle school. He had gone on to become successful with in the "in" crowd while I had not and hence faced the constant snubbing this group put out.
Having been friendly a one point in the past, I considered greeting him as we approached one another. Just how might I speak to this golden Adonis I wondered. Probably a simple "how's it going" I figured and began to speak, as he surely would not step below his station and greet me first. Then, half way through my short sentence my mind raced to the thought that it was indeed the last minutes of the school term and a fair well greeting would be more appropriate and I tried to instead say" hang in there." What came out was " how's it hanging"
He walked a step or two, slowed, his face lit to a smile and said " long and heavy man, long and heavy"
This was mid June of 64 at Hayward High School in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The following September at the onset of the new term, the term how's it hanging had become the familiar greeting among the boys of that clique and from this quickly spread within a few weeks around the Bay Area.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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5On June 17, 1964, Ken Kesey boarded the bus "Further" with other Merry Pranksters – including Tom Wolfe, who chronicled the trip in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The purpose of the trip was to take Ken to New York for the release of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Ken’s novel contains the first use in print of the greeting “how’s it hanging” that Google Book Search can find. While it is certainly possible you coined the phrase independently, you were not the first. It is also likely that the novel is responsible for the popularity of the phrase in San Francisco.– MetaEdCommented Feb 27, 2013 at 0:54
It may be that this wheel was reinvented here in the states, conceptually it's not exactly rocket science, but I heard this phrase in the 70's from a bi-racial friend. Half her family was Polish. She said all her life she'd watched her uncles greet each other, in Polish, with a phrase that sounded like "Yakna vishi?" To which the customary reply (always in English) was 'Hanging mighty low, brother. Hanging mighty low." The Polish words translated to: "How are they hanging?"
She told me the story that one night walking home a group of drunken Polish sailors were walking behind her. They began catcalling the exotic young woman she apparently was to them and she picked up her pace. They did too. She got to her vestibule and just as she disappeared inside she turned to call to them "Yakna vishi?" They burst into laughter and applause.
The meaning may vary depending on who uses the phrase.
Grammarhow acknowledges the original genital-related implications, but says that it can be used simply as more of a "how are you" style question.
“How’s it hanging” means “what’s up” or “what’s on your mind.” We use it as a greeting to ask how things are going in somebody’s life. The original meaning has been lost, and many people simply use it as a new slang term for asking how you are.
This is what I personally always assumed it meant. I think that the original meaning is subtle enough that people can pick it up as a phrase and assume it means "how are you", without learning or even wondering about how it came about.
Given the possible ambiguity, it's probably worth avoiding using it in some contexts, but it's still worth being aware that other people who use it may intend the more innocent meaning.
