Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(A little posting at the end of a ghastly week, just to show I’m still alive.)

Blogging brings with it a variety of unexpected tasks — notably, dealing with vast amounts of spam, malicious comments, faked commenters, and the like, but also coping with the fact that my blog postings are publicly available from way back (and should be, because they’re complexly intertwined and cross-referential, as I develop and pursue ideas, and exemplify them in fresh ways, creating a dense fabric of postings — about 15,000 of them now, going back decades on a number of different blogs), with the result that a reader will comment on an individual posting, even from long ago, as if it had just appeared — because, of course to that reader the posting was indeed a fresh discovery. So I need to respond to such a comment in the same spirit.

Invariably, I have to re-read the old posting (I often have no recollection of it at all) and, usually others linked in it (to get the context), so responding to such comments takes a fair amount of time and thought. This effort is just simple respect for my readers, but it’s also gratifying, because it comes with the suggestion that my writing lives on, has an audience, was worth the sweat it took. That means a lot to me, because this endless stream of postings is the single work of my late life, the product of my profession. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at intellectual entertainment and in fact resent the other demands on my time and energy that divert me from my calling.

Which brings me to a comment from one m. lewis (someone I don’t think I know, but whose reality and good intentions I have no reason to doubt) on 9/11, about my 8/11/13 posting “crouch, squat, hunker” (from only 12 years ago, so I had a vague recollection of the piece, but still had to research it):

I only began looking into hunkering, as I’ve done it all my life and only thought about it when my coworkers remarked about me doing it while one was kneeling and the other was crouched over as we worked with some equipment on the ground. They thought my posture was funny but I heard them groaning on standing after we finished work. Is hunkering really that unusual? I’ll often do it when outdoors in lengthy group discussions while everyone else stands. It really is a wakeful resting posture. I wish it were more widespread and not regarded as unusual.

As it happens, ml asks about things I’d done some reading on while I was preparing the 2013 posting, but didn’t put into the posting: on the anatomical demands of the hunkering posture; and on the place of hunkering in different cultures. My reply:

I suspect that you find it so natural and restful now because you routinely hunkered through childhood, so that your joints, ligaments, and muscles accommodated to the posture; this is how it works in cultures where adults hunker — everybody does it in childhood, a lot, so they’re able to continue using the posture all their lives. Failing that kind of support, only a few adults will find hunkering comfortable, and it will be in fact unusual.

Lovely: I was in fact a prepared mind, and didn’t have to rev up an entirely new line of research.

This entry was posted on September 13, 2025 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Culture, Language and the body, This blogging life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.