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hunker doon v. crouch, squat down; submit, resign oneself; shelter etc

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“hunker doon v. crouch, squat down; submit, resign oneself; shelter etc ”

10th March 2008

Hunker doon (or down), meaning crouch down, has been recorded in Scottish sources since the eighteenth century, but in the last hundred years or so it has also become popular in English, especially in the United States. Along with its people, Scotland exported many words and phrases to North America, and hunker down is one which has made this journey, developing new meanings along the way. In modern use, hunkering down can be found in military contexts, meaning taking cover or lying low, but in more general use it often refers to concentrating one’s resources or buckling down to a task. An issue of the UK’s Truck and Driver magazine from 1988 provides the following: "I left the down-change too late and missed the gear. But the Fiat was kindly and just hunkered down and powered on from low revs once a lower gear was pushed in".

Hunker is thought to derive from an early Germanic word, the common ancestor of Old Norse huka and modern German hocken, both meaning crouch, sit on one’s hams. The first known Scots use occurs in a poem by Alexander Pennecuik, in his Merry Tales for the Lang Nights of Winter (1720): "And hunk’ring down upon the cald Grass, A Thistle on the Grave jagged her …". In less bawdy contexts, the phrase has been used derisively of genuflexion in non-Presbyterian worship, and sometimes implies submissiveness, as in Perthshire poet John Smith’s Poems and Lyrics (1888): "By love tae man, an’ a’ that’s guid, We’ll hunker doon tae nane!" Hunkers is also used in modern Scots of the hams or haunches. In February 2006, the Aberdeen Press and Journal included these reminiscences: "Memories come back o … lang simmer days puin berries or doon on wir hunkers weedin the fir seedlins at the nursery".