Syntactic blending: bunker down

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Fri, 10 Oct 2003 11:41:22 -0400, Seán Fitzpatrick
<grendel.jjf at VERIZON.NET> quoted from the LA Weekly

"By bunkering down with the  discredited and justly scorned Gray Davis, they
wound up defending an indefensible status quo ..."

The more I think about this one, the more I feel this is more than a
confusion between the phonetically similar "hunker down" and "bunker".  "Hunker
(down)" according to MWCD11 is "to settle in or dig in for a sustained period";
however "bunker" (to me at least) suggests "bunker mentality".  Hence if they
merely "hunkered down" then they and Mr. Davis merely decided to wait out the
current hoopla.  To "bunker down" implies that as well as merely waiting things
out, they also adopted an inflexible, reactionary, misanthropic, think up your
own adjective mental attitude.

Without even thinking of Mr. Davis (about whom I do not wish to express an
opinion at the moment), I can come up with a list of a number of politicians who
have "bunkered down".  It's a useful metaphor, and I hereby nominate it for
WOTY (I know.  Fat chance.  But I still like it).

My daughter came up with what I think qualifies as a syntactic blend.
Discussing freeloaders at a soup kitchen, she said that "they were taking abuse of
[the proprietor of the kitchen]."  In this case she was clearly conflating
"taking advantage of" and "abusing".  Apparently she had started to say "taking
advantage" but, just an instant too late, decided that phrase was not forceful
enough and she wished to state that these people were abusing the time and
material of the people running the kitchen.

       - James A. Landau