1. sit on one’s heels
2. hold stubbornly to a position
3. take shelter
The term hunker down has appeared in 99 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on April 10 in “Couples Quality Time, All the Time” by Ronda Kaysen:
Until a few weeks ago, Jo Cipolla had no idea that she was married to a pacer, the type of office worker who struts back and forth across a room during business calls, shouting into his AirPods.
“He’s a fairly soft-spoken person, but when he’s conducting business, he’s not,” said Ms. Cipolla, who spends nearly 24 hours a day inside the 800-square-foot Murray Hill apartment she shares with Luke Rossiter, her husband of five years, as they hunker down during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Rossiter, 32, who works in finance, is used to spending his days in an office in Connecticut, one with a door that closes, where he can pace in peace. And Ms. Cipolla, 32, a marketing director for SquareFoot, a commercial real estate company, usually works out of an office in Midtown.
