hunkering down...

Recent email correspondences with two very different people have had me looking more closely at the wide range of dictionary definitions available in hard copy and on line. If life is not fraught enough already, try adding a little long-distance banter or cultural differences and sort them out by email with conflicting dictionary definitions!

I playfully called a friend a "roué or cad" recently (as sung by Rolf in Sixteen Going on Seventeen, from The Sound of Music) and THEN, after he had equally airily accepted the adjectives, looked up the meanings. (Yes, he did offer me food and wine when I was 16 or 17, and it is possible he thought he deserved the descriptors!) The definitions were harsher than I had intended, the etymology fascinating!

Roué
Etymology: French, literally, broken on the wheel, from past participle of rouer to break on the wheel, from Medieval Latin rotare, from Latin, to rotate; from the feeling that such a person deserves this punishment
Date: 1800
: a man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure

Cad
Etymology: English dialect, unskilled assistant, short for Scots caddie
Date: 1833
1 : an omnibus conductor
2 : a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another's feelings or rights

The other word, not used in jest so it did cause me some problems of definition, was "novelette".

I mention these only because, after spending some time packing away summer clothes and preparing part of my house for plaster and paint, I typed in the title "hunkering down". I felt as though I was hunkering down for the winter, although protective more than squirrel-like perhaps. But... after "novelette", I decided to google the phrase "hunkering down". I'm not sure that that is what I am doing at all!

However, I am going to continue "hunkering down", but this post title means only what *I* intend it to mean, in my very own interpretation of the phrase.