Wordly find of the day: ‘hat-handedly‘. As an adjectival modifier, “hat-handedly sincere”, as in this metatalk comment by majick. Meaning something along the lines of “as if while standing humbly with your hat in your hands”. Google turns up about 142,000 hits for “hat in hand” itself, and I’m sure there are other variations of that idiom that’d turn up healthy hit counts as well. But what about hat-handedly?

Zero google hits at the moment for the phrase; one, in the near future, to this blog entry assuming it doesn’t suddenly fall into use. (And maybe another citing the original metatalk comment, though I have gotten the impression that Google doesn’t index them all the way to the bottom when they get longish; the thread in question has 128 comments right now.) So, as close as negative results from Google can get us to verified neologism! Exciting: let’s dig farther!

There are about 6600 hits for “hat-handed“, but it doesn’t appear to be this usage: the first page of results is all for the unrelated and unhyphenated “[x had his] hat handed [to him]” idiom, in various forms:

origin of “To have your hat handed To you?
Rumsfeld gets his “Fascist” hat handed to him.
Donahue getting his hat handed to him by O’Reilly
Tom Coburn’s hat handed to him by Murkowski and Stevens.
PureX Gets His Hat Handed To Him!

The first page also includes a couple of results with literal mentions of hats being passed from hand to hand (”Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., puts on a cowboy hat handed to him) or handed down as from parent to child (as this photo suggests). Scanning the next few pages of results turns up only more instances of various folks having their hats handed to them; there’s no earnest hat-handed people in sight.

No dice for “hat-handing”, either; mostly just folks wearing hats (or who are hat-people, as in the CEO of the linux firm Red Hat) handing this or that to whomever. In an OCR gaffe, Google Books suggests a title on painting mentions hat handing when in fact it’s talking about hat banding.

There’s a tiny blip here: “hat-in-handing” turns up three distinct results for me at the moment. One of these is a throwaway (”You are to take off your hat in handing a lady to a carriage, to a box at the theater, or to a public room.”), but two others are the genuine article:

Then both political parties will come hat in handing asking what they as a group truly want.

No railroad is financed, no great “industrial” projected, without by force of habit, hat-in-handing a by-your-leave of Randolph & Randolph…

The first quote is from a blog comment on hotair.com in 2006. The second quote is from Friday, the Thirteenth, a novel by Thomas W. Lawson published in 1906. Lovely century gap, there.

I will have to go hat-handing more often, I think. But I won’t be flippant about it; I’ll do so hat-handedly, said hat off, by implication, to majick for the inspiration.