Getting a better hang of it?

Reader question:

Please explain “better hang” in this: I made another video this weekend. I’ve made five in the past two weeks. I’m getting a better hang of it. I’m getting more follows and a lot of likes. Very excited.

My comments:

The speaker is making short videos on social media and is getting better and better at it.

The speaker, he or she, has made five videos in the past two weeks. Naturally, the more they do something, the more skillful they are at it, as they get more familiar with all the tricks and intricacies involved.

The speaker, in short, is getting a better hang of it. He or she is getting more follows in addition to a lot of likes. They’re excited.

And they should be. The speaker, I mean, a he or a she.

Oh, a better hang.

The expression in question is “getting the hang of something”. The “hang” in this expression originally refers to the way the blade of a knife or ax or scythe is angled. With the different ways in which these tools are formed, it is of course useful for us to learn how to handle and use them properly in order to achieve the greatest efficiency. Once we’re familiar with the ins and outs of a tool, so to speak, we can proudly say we’ve got the hang of it.

In other words, we’ve grasped it.

Here’s an explanation of the “hang” of it in The Story Behind an Idiom: “Get the Hang of Something”, by Gabriela Torres (Ludwig.Guru, December 5, 2025), an academic linguist who is “passionate about the structural evolution of English communication and the historical morphology of idiomatic forms”:

The noun “hang” dates back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this context, it referred to the specific way a tool handle was fitted to its blade, particularly scythes, axes, or hammers. This was crucial for laborers.

If a scythe had the proper “hang,” the angle was correct, the weight was balanced, and the farmer could swing it all day with maximum efficiency and minimum fatigue. If a worker understood how to hold and swing the tool to utilize its specific weight and angle, they had “gotten the hang of it.”

Sounds simple, right?

Right, but with any tool, it takes practice for one to get the hang of it.

Indeed, it takes practice to make perfect.

All right, let’s read a few media examples of getting the hang of it, meaning becoming quite skillful at something, especially something tricky and difficult:

1. WHEN Harold Laski was made chairman of the British Labour Party after its astonishing electoral sweep in the wake of the Allied victory in Europe, there was more than a ripple of curiosity on both sides of the Atlantic about the likely impact on British politics of a towering intellectual. How would this professor, this double-dome political theorist, intimate of Justice Holmes, historian of everything from Marxism and European liberalism to the American Presidency, synchronize his vast knowledge with the day-today know-how of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the upper-middle-class settlement worker, Fabian convert, survivor of Gallipoli, wartime deputy of Churchill, and first-rate parliamentarian? Many years later, the Encyclopaedia Britannica offered a dim but fair obituary judgment: “His persistent efforts . . . to work out a philosophy for the British socialist movement did not bear much fruit.” The 1945 onlookers did not have so long to wait. Attlee, who never used ten sentences where one would do, put it crisply: “Rum thing about Harold – never got the hang of it.”

It is a definitive comment on the yawning gap between ideology and policy, between “political science” and politics, between the urge to draft a model bill and Franklin Roosevelt’s impulse to trust to the pricking of his thumbs. Even in our own time, when political analysis proliferates in every daily newspaper and hourly television bulletin, the real practice of politics and the commentaries on it are farther apart than most commentators would care to admit. (It would amount to a confession of ignorance about a whole body of secret knowledge.) And whenever a new President moves into the White House, few pundits – the loftier the fewer – bother to wonder whether he will or will not get the hang of it. But Congress wonders early on, and watches and waits. In the first month of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, amazement verging on disbelief overtook the Democrats in the Senate when it appeared that the President’s telephone line to the Senate was dead. This cloistered seclusion, implying that the business of congressional liaison was the preserve of the kitchen cabinet, or help, he had imported from Atlanta, testified to the new President’s unawareness of the elementary fact that the first allies he must seek in Congress are the majority and the minority leaders in the Senate. There were many surprises of the same sort to come, and they started from the presumption that Carter, though then obscure as a public character, must have proved – in Georgia, at least – that he was a practiced political animal. It turned out that he was not. He remained for quite a time the beneficiary of the usual public vagueness outside a governor’s own state about his political record and aptitude. Yet anyone who had covered Carter during his time in the state senate and as governor could have told us that he was never the literate Huck Finn and Populist reformer of our imagining but a Navy technician with an accountant’s temperament, whose notion of duty was equated with such a passion for the detail of paperwork that it made him see six sides to every issue and left him in the moment of decision like a centipede with all its legs wriggling but its body immobile.

No candidate could have made a sharper contrast in character and political behavior than Ronald Reagan, though during the Presidential campaign the public knew as little about Reagan’s tenure in Sacramento as it had known about Carter’s in Atlanta. What the people saw – what the Presidential campaign was designed, as always, to exaggerate – was the more dashing and superficial aspects of the contrast: a natural optimist against a cautionary school principal; a confident purveyor of half-truths, and often of howling boners, which yet gave more hope (and more false hope) to more people than Carter’s sober insistence that life is real and earnest and painfully complicated; a broadcaster, who had learned through years of practice, and as many as fourteen speeches a day on the road for General Electric, to be his best self talking to a couple of neighbors in a room, against a thoughtful and sometimes verbose lay preacher addressing a congregation; a seeming young Reagan against a seeming old Carter (Reagan’s frequent jokes about his senility and the Reagan team’s decision – before the New Hampshire primary – to organize public celebrations of his sixty-ninth birthday were enough to obliterate the “age” issue).

What we did not remember then, and what both Ford and Carter fatally discounted, was Reagan’s long and arduous political apprenticeship in California, “the great microcosmic nation state of North America,” which provided a trial run of just about every domestic issue that would confront a President. Reagan arrived in Sacramento as a breezy rhetorician “monumentally ignorant of state issues.” Through eight years, he developed a “proclivity for doing what was necessary at the expense of his rhetoric,” and he left office with nearly sixty per cent of Californians believing him to have been a good governor – ”a popular Republican governor at a time his party had sunk to its lowest public esteem in American history.” These are not my own judgments but quotations from Lou Cannon’s “Reagan” (Putnam; $18.95), an exhaustively researched chronicle of the America that Reagan grew up in and outgrew (though never in his ideals or prejudices). Most of all, it is about the making of an idealistic small-town Midwestern youth, “intuitively keen but intellectually lazy,” into a professional politician who, despite his rigidities and mooning nostalgia, has, for better or worse, “defined the ground of political discourse” and “set the nation on a course of change.” Mr. Cannon, the present White House correspondent for the Washington Post, has followed Reagan and his associates and advisers and enemies since 1966. Two years before, in the gloom of Goldwater’s Presidential defeat, Reagan’s family and friends had urged him to run for governor and caused him to lament with mock distaste, “Oh, my God, they’re closing in all over.”

- Getting the Hang of it, By Alistair Cooke, The New Yorker, March 7, 1983.

2. His Twitter account profile reads “Cricket is my life, thinking and talking about it, my passion…! Teaching it now, what drives me.” And this is exactly what Amol Mazumdar is doing nowadays. Talking about cricket, thinking and now teaching.

His exquisite drives during his playing days were a treat for the eyes, and though Amol Muzumdar never got a chance to make it to the Indian team, his prolific first-class career over two decades saw him obliterate many batting records only to be better known as ‘one of the best who never played India’. That tag line hardly is a matter of ‘regret’ for the present Mumbai team coach, who is in Oman with the India’s domestic cricket giants, for a two-week tour.

In an exclusive chat with Muscat Daily on Saturday, Muzumdar said, “It has been a fantastic week so far in Oman. We were pleasantly surprised by the infrastructure at the Oman Cricket Academy Ground. Oman is hosting the ICC T20 World Cup in October so the facilities are expectedly top-class.”

The visiting Mumbai team concluded the three-match T20 series on Friday with Duleep Mendis-coached Oman winning the series 2-1. Mumbai will now play a four-match 50-over series, beginning on Sunday.

Having watched Oman play three T20 games against his boys, Muzumdar was ‘impressed’ with the hosts’ talent.

“They have some good bowlers and couple of good strikers of the ball. It is evident that the boys have put in a lot of hard yards over the years under coach Duleep [Mendis].

“I am sure that this team [Oman] is a result of last few years and the coach has worked hard to get this squad and talent together. I definitely have seen some talent in Oman team.”

…

The Mumbai stalwart said that India will go into the T20 World Cup as one of the favourites as almost all the players would be featuring in the IPL just ahead of the global showpiece. The IPL 2021 will resume in the UAE on September 17 and conclude on October 15.

“They [Indian players] will be in a great position to play the T20 World Cup purely because IPL finishes just before the World Cup. It will be a great practice for the players and all the players who will be part of the IPL will get a good hang of it. Besides India, I think the teams to watch out would be Pakistan, New Zealand and England. New Zealand does well in ICC events and England’s brand of cricket has been phenomenal of late,” he said.

- Muzumdar: Bowling is Oman’s strength, MuscatDaily.com, August 28, 2021.

3. I grew up skiing. As in, we lived in the mountains and skied every weekend of winter, kind of thing.

At one point, early in our relationship, my husband looked at me, semi-astonished: “I think you're better on skis than feet.” So it was reaaaally important to me that, first, my then fiancé (now husband) and I could share this amazing sport together, and second, that when my kids were old enough, they too would know the awkward joys of being thrown off a J-bar.

But before we could cruise the groomers as a family, we had to get through many painful winters learning to ski.

I thought I could teach my husband. The problem was that what comes naturally to someone who’s been doing it all her life is really hard to put into words for someone who, well, grew up in urban Chicago.

But we tried! We rented skis and hit the bunny hills, specifically at a small Midwest ski resort called “Alpine Valley.” What could go wrong?

My husband is athletic and approached skiing with the confidence of someone who is good at every sport he tries. Until he skied. As we crested the ridge of the first hill, it all happened in a millisecond.

Unable to put my weak “pizza pie!” lessons into action, he immediately spun wildly out of control, barreling straight down the mountain, one ski and one pole in the air, screaming “stop, stop, stop!” until he eventually did, hitting a fluorescent orange snowmaking turbine with such force that it slowly whirred to life. By the time I got to him, he was already throwing his skis over his shoulders and walking. “You know how you don’t play basketball?” He screamed at me. “Maybe I just don’t ski!”

Not the best start to our alpine life together.

We needed a few no-ski winters after that one. But eventually, we tried again, this time with calculated professional intervention. We headed to our home mountain (Sunapee) and enlisted the help of a calm, 65-year-old pro with lovely, encouraging-grandpa vibes. As the pair clomped into the lodge at the end of a long Saturday, they were both beaming. “He can ski!” said the instructor.

Kids, it turns out, are much harder (and more expensive) to offload. My strategy with them was to put in sheer hours on the hill. The only way out is through, kind of thing. Sacrificing gorgeous bluebird ski days and many, many hundreds of dollars’ worth of adult lift tickets to cold, crabby ingrates between my skis.

Eventually, they got the hang of it. And eventually, I got my ski-family wish.

- I taught my kids – not my husband – to ski. That is why I’m still married. By Liz Zack, BusinessInsider.com, February 2, 2026.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）