HUNK, n., HUNKER, v. “Hunker” was requested, since it’s timely and we are all hunkering down as much as possible, and it made me wonder about “hunk.” Both are of uncertain origin and they don’t seem to be related.
“Hunker,” in the sense of crouching or squatting, might be related to “haunch.” “Hunker” is definitely Scottish and probably a cognate of German “hocken” (to crouch, to squat) and Old Norse “húka,” meaning the same. “Hunker down” meaning to lower your body to the ground or to stay in place for a long time is a 20th-century Americanism. (Why do we need “down” if “hunker” already means “crouch”? I don’t know. We love a phrasal verb in this country. We’re wild for tacking on prepositions.)
“Hunk” as in a large piece of something shows up in English in the 19th century, but it’s unclear where it came from.
More relevant to the interests of this newsletter, “hunk” as in a big ol’ romance novel hero “appears to have been coined as a description of the film star Victor Mature, first described as a ‘beautiful hunk of a man’ and a ‘wonderful hunk of a man’ by Sheilah Graham in a syndicated column on 3/4/1941” according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Sheilah Graham was a British-born American gossip columnist and I guess she liked her men large. (Though she did have an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald, so maybe she liked variety. Google says he was 5’9”; Ernest Hemingway said his other measurements were “perfectly fine.”)
Victor Mature was apparently my fellow Kentuckian, and there is an article about him from Kentucky Monthly titled “The Original Hollywood Hunk.”
YMMV on hunkiness, but here he is:
We can’t know if Victor Mature ever said to anyone “Look up* ‘hunk’ in the dictionary** and you’ll find*** a picture of me,” but if he did, it would almost have been true.
*dig into four different sources
**on the internet
***steal from Google Image Search but hey I make no money here, fair use
In Capital-R Romance, one of my reading resolutions this year was to read something, anything, in Italian. Now I have fulfilled it several times over by reading distressing articles, which was not how I wanted this to go. But there was also that wonderful compilation of Italian mayors yelling at their constituents to go home (for the Tru Romance Linguistics Nerdz, there is a beautiful example of syntactic doubling/raddoppiamento sintattico in that video, you can really hear how “a casa” is pronounced [a‿kˈkaːza]) and now, even better, there is this video of a dog doing yoga in Italian. Perfetto.
Also in Romance languages, I listened to this Québécois podcast explaining “big dick energy” solely for the accents, which are delightful. (The conversation is also entertaining, if controversial—Spider-Man?! really?—but let’s be real, I was there for the nasal vowels.)
Ironically, there was a dearth of hunks in my small-r romance reading this week, because I read
Four books I abandoned. This one’s a real “it’s not you, it’s me.” These books weren’t poorly written. But if a romance epilogue has a pregnancy in it, my poor traumatized brain goes “That’s not Happily Ever After! What if she dies?!” and then I gotta quit reading even if there are only two pages left. Times are hard, I can’t be deliberately reading things that make me feel bad. (Tell that to the 23 grim news items I shove into my brain every day.)
Weirdly, I can still read books where pregnancy is treated like something dangerous (like A Heart of Blood and Ashes) or books that discuss past miscarriage (like Gilded Cage), though I always appreciate a warning. But any book that presents pregnancy as 100% uncomplicated happiness doesn’t work for me right now. I’m saying this because it sure would be nice if romance authors and reviewers mentioned pregnancy in their content warnings.
“Redressed” (f/f, both cis? and lesbian?, historical, fantasy, short story) by Cat Sebastian. Sarah Turner, hardworking 41-year-old London seamstress, meets a selkie while visiting Cornwall. Together they enact vigilante justice against abusive husbands. They also fall in love. It’s excellent. Content warnings: abusive relationships mentioned but not depicted on the page, violence, murder (implied, not on the page).
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, this week I read a manuscript by my friend K.R. Collins, an entry in her series about women hockey players joining what has previously been a men’s professional league. The first book in the series, Breaking the Ice, is free as an ebook right now. It has great, tense scenes of game play and big found-family feelings, and I can promise you that if you read the series, you will be treated to an incredible slow-burn romance unfolding between two of the women players. If anybody in your life is a hockey fan who’s bummed about the cancellation of the season, point them toward this book. Content warnings: main character’s dad is emotionally abusive, some sexist bullying/hazing.
This week, I also started reading Patricia Lockwood’s dazzling memoir Priestdaddy. More on that next week. I picked it up because a couple days ago, I went back to this 2018 Patricia Lockwood essay, “How Do We Write Now,” about the value of concentration in times when it’s hard to concentrate. As always, Lockwood is hilarious, and the two lines I remember most frequently from this essay are
If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind.
and
Read one of those Annie Dillard books where she watches an ant fuck for like fourteen straight hours and at the end of it somehow believes in God even more than she did already.
and because it’s Lockwood, the essay is not only funny but also truthful and profound. This is a passage to hold close:
Paradise is not just the day when the poem pours down like Niagara with the hottest couple in the world kissing steamily behind it, it is also the day that you spend changing the word A to THE and back again. That concentration is reverence. You are passing the beads of things through your fingertips and your head is bowed and your mouth is moving and the preexisting rhythm has found its place in you.
I’m not saying you’re lucky to be there. I’m saying as long as you live there you are in opposition to the powers that rule the world. You are the opposite of money. You are against presidents, oil spills, slaughterhouses, Young Sheldon. You’re the opposite of the red button under Matt Lauer’s desk. You’re the opposite of the red button that ends it all. You have never been so hard in your own name. Nobody has you.
I haven’t been spending much time in Paradise lately, but it’s a comfort to know it still exists somewhere, and this essay makes me feel like maybe I could get there again—without leaving the house.
Hope you are all safely hunkered down (and amply supplied with hunks, or not, according to your preference). See you next week!
