I don’t know when it started, but I have a real problem with describing the act of “hanging out” in the past tense. I’m perfectly comfortable saying “I was hanging out with some friends the other day.” But you can only use that in certain cases, like as a set-up for some other story element: “I was hanging out with some friends the other day, when a UFO landed in my front lawn.” You can’t just have that be the only thing you say, cause it leaves people “hanging.”

But then it doesn’t feel appropriate saying “I hanged out with a friend today.” Even “I hung out with a friend today” sounds weird to me if I think about it too much. I think this is the one I used to use, but I don’t like it anymore.

But you can’t just substitute out a word necessarily, like you can’t say “I went out with so and so,” especially if it’s a girl, cause that could imply that you did some kind of date thing. And it becomes cumbersome to further modify where you went, such as “I went to the store with a friend today.” Cause then it’s just like who the hell cares. It again becomes too specific and again makes it seem like you’re going to tell a story about what happened when you went to the store. If you are, then that’s great. But what if you’re not?

The (I like to think) elegant solution that I came up with is to use the word “chilled” when I need to describe in the past tense the act of “hanging out” with someone when I am not trying to set it up for another story element (which the “was hanging out” would require according to my grammatical idiosyncrasies). So then, if somebody were to ask me what I did today, I could say, “Oh, I chilled with a friend of mine. We had fun.” And that would be that.

EDITOR’S NOTE

I just looked it up, and according to the usage notes for the word “hang“, “hanged” is only appropriate to use in relation to death or execution. “Hung” is preferrable in all other cases. I was also noticing that if I were to say: “We hung out three weeks ago,” then I would feel completely fine about saying “hung out.” Or also, “They hung out.” But it still doesn’t feel right when used with a singular noun. So there!