Did you know there's a game called "Hunker Down"?
Don't confuse it with Husker Du, which was a children's board game, sort of like Concentration on TV, but with no Hugh Downs.
No, the Hunker Down game is played when everyone is sitting around watching The Weather Channel or some local coverage of an impending hurricane or blizzard or Ed Shearan concert - the sort of calamity that makes us take shelter. You play it this way: every time someone on the news (an anchor in the studio with his jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled up to indicate seriousness of purpose, or a reporter out on the street wearing an LL Bean anorak and holding onto a "YIELD" sign for dear life) says, "It's time to hunker down..." you take a nip, and the last person standing wins.
I said it was a game. I didn't say it was a good game.
But, fascinated with words, I looked up "hunker" in the Merriam-Webster, and from there I found that it's "Originally Scottish. Origin unknown, but probably of Germanic origin, perhaps *hunk- or *huk-. Probable cognates include Old Norse húka, Dutch huiken, and German hocken.
Don't confuse it with Husker Du, which was a children's board game, sort of like Concentration on TV, but with no Hugh Downs.
No, the Hunker Down game is played when everyone is sitting around watching The Weather Channel or some local coverage of an impending hurricane or blizzard or Ed Shearan concert - the sort of calamity that makes us take shelter. You play it this way: every time someone on the news (an anchor in the studio with his jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled up to indicate seriousness of purpose, or a reporter out on the street wearing an LL Bean anorak and holding onto a "YIELD" sign for dear life) says, "It's time to hunker down..." you take a nip, and the last person standing wins.
I said it was a game. I didn't say it was a good game.
But, fascinated with words, I looked up "hunker" in the Merriam-Webster, and from there I found that it's "Originally Scottish. Origin unknown, but probably of Germanic origin, perhaps *hunk- or *huk-. Probable cognates include Old Norse húka, Dutch huiken, and German hocken.
Verb[edit]
hunker (third-person singular simple present hunkers, present participle hunkering, simple past and past participle hunkered)
- (intransitive) To crouch or squat close to the ground.
Synonyms[edit]
Derived terms[edit]
Are you like me, picturing German-Scots wearing kilts and eating sauerbraten, getting ready to hunker?
I'll tell you something really cool you can get just by going to the Merriam-Webster site! You can look at a word and find when it was first used in print...or look at a year and see what words were first used in that year!
I take no small pride in seeing that "cable television," "Cargo pants," and "water gun" first saw the light of day in the year I did the same.
And "hunker" dates back to 1720, a dozen years before George Washington came along, but surely, sometime that year, some colonial in a tricorn hat told his neighbor that his aching knee told him that a big storm was coming in and so it was time to hunker down in the sod hut.
Isn't history fun?
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