To sling your hook is to leave, and to be told to sling your hook is to be told, in no uncertain terms, to clear off. It is British slang, still in everyday use, and it sits in that comfortable register of dismissals that are blunt without being obscene. The past-tense form is just as common as the imperative: a manager who has “slung his hook” has walked out, or been shown the door, and football reporters in particular have never tired of the construction.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘sling your hook’?
The phrase is a Victorian survivor. It appears, already needing no explanation, in the 1874 edition of John Camden Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary, which defines “Sling your hook” as “a polite invitation to move-on” and notes that “Sling your Daniel” meant the same thing. Hotten also records the close relatives “hook it” and “take your hook”, both meaning to be off about your business. The family is older than his dictionary: Green’s Dictionary of Slang traces “take a hook” to 1864 and finds “I slung my hook” in a Memphis newspaper of 1867, so the expression was in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic by the late 1860s. An 1897 Daily News report catches it in its natural habitat: “If you don’t sling yer hook this minute, here goes a pewter pot at yer head.” By 1922 it was literary property; Joyce has “Slung her hook, she did” in Ulysses.
What nobody has settled is which hook. The tidiest story is nautical: the hook is the ship’s anchor, slung and secured before departure, so that to sling your hook was to make ready to sail away. The rival theories all make the hook a working man’s tool instead. Miners are said to have hung their day clothes on a numbered hook, collected at the end of a shift; dockers carried a personal cargo hook, slung over the shoulder when there was no work to be had; Michael Quinion of World Wide Words wondered whether “sling” stood in for “swing” and the hook was a labourer’s billhook; and a fishing version has the angler slinging his hook into more promising water.
None of these comes with contemporary evidence, and the early citations lean away from the sea. The first recorded uses are street and music-hall slang, not sailors’ talk, and the easy swapping of “sling”, “take” and even “Daniel” suggests the hook was something a man carried with him rather than several tons of anchor. English has always been well stocked with hook phrases (by hook or by crook was centuries old by then), and the honest verdict is that this one’s hook has never been identified.