"When I was studying in England, I only hung around with English people, whereas here there are a lot of international students".
Or, as the Pet Shop Boys phrased it: "I only wanted something else to do but hang around".
Instead, a spirit of national self-possession not only hung around in Scotland, unbowed, but grew in fervor and fed directly into the general-election campaign.
Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up.
Now that's not staggeringly worse than some of the other devices I've tested these past few months — the Nexus 4 only hung around for an extra 50 or so minutes — but the key words here are "continuous use".
Too often a plane lands only to hang around for a ground crew to unload it, or for an earlier flight to move away from a gate.
You only have to hang around, and hang in.
But in an era when C.E.O.'s seem to hang around for only two or three years (see Coca-Cola, or Mattel) before the directors decide they have made a mistake, Mr. Welch's 20 years of virtually uninterrupted success inspires curiosity -- enough, Time Warner hopes, to sell 1.6 million books.
