Syntactic blending: bunker down

[Mark A Mandel]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Clai Rice wrote:

#At what point does a blend cease to be a blend and become its own phrase?
#
#Google returns about 2,360 hits for "bunker down"; LexisNexis provides 350
#hits for "bunker down" AND NOT "golf" (to eliminate uses like the following:
#

Forgive me if I'm saying something already said in this thread, but what
with moving and all I'm now in the midst of catching up and ripping
through some 900 messages in my inbox. Has anyone suggested a possible
partial source for "bunker down" in "hunker down"?

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania