Strand

Strand (pronounced strand)

(1) To drive or leave (a ship, fish etc) aground or ashore.

(2) To bring into or leave in a helpless position (usually used in the passive).

(3) A shore or beach (now poetic, archaic or regional).

(4) A small brook or rivulet (archaic).

(5) A passage for water; a gutter (Northern England & Scotland)

(6) A foreign country (archaic).

(7) One of a number of fibres, threads, or yarns, plaited or twisted together to form a rope, cord, or the like.

(8) A rope made of such twisted or plaited fibres.

(9) A fibre or filament, as in animal or plant tissue.

(10) A thread or threadlike part of anything.

(11) By extension, a constituent element in a complex argument.

(12) A street in the Westminster district of west-central London, running from Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street parallel to the Thames, so-called because it was the “north strand” (ie shore) of the river; also the areas immediately surrounding the street.

Pre 1000:  From the Middle English strand or strond, (sea shore), from Old English strand (shore), related to the Dutch strand and Middle High German strant (beach) and the Latin sternere (to spread).  The Old English was borrowed from the Proto-Germanic strandaz & strandō (edge, rim, shore), source also of the Danish and Swedish strand (beach, shore, strand), the Old Norse strönd (border, edge, shore) the Middle Low German strant and the German and Dutch strand (beach).  The origin of the Proto-Germanic is uncertain but may be from the primitive Indo-European ster- (to broaden or stretch out), the application of which was “the parts of a shore that lies between the tide-marks” and it applied formerly also to river banks, hence The Strand in London, the name dating from 1246.

Françoise Hardy (b 1944), The Strand, London, 1966.

Historically, in Middle English it described things riparian, the use to refer to “individual fibres of a rope, string etc” or human hair first recorded circa 1500, probably from the Old French estran, from a Germanic source akin to the Old High German streno (lock, tress, strand of hair) from which is derived the Middle Dutch strene (a skein, hank of thread) and the German strähne (a skein, strand) of unknown origin.  The meaning "to drive aground on a shore" from which flowed the figurative sense of "leave lost or helpless" as of a ship left aground by the tide, was first recorded in 1837 and survives in the words stranded & stranding. Descendants of the Germanic root appear in many European languages including Hungarian, Romanian & Serbo-Croatian and it’s a not uncommon proper noun in the Nordic lands, both as a surname and locality name.

The stranded phrase

In linguistic anthropology, a stranded phrase is a once-popular saying that has fallen from use.  The idea is shared with economics where the term stranded asset is used to describe assets held which have been subject to a premature or unanticipated devaluation in their value, the most commonly quoted potential examples being vast, undeveloped coal-fields which decades ago were highly valued, to be capitalized over a productive life which might be forty or more years but which may shortly become worthless because of shifts in the market.  Phrases can fall from favor for structural reasons or just become unfashionable in the way something like “stone the crows” is archaic, stranded in the time of its popularity, sometimes surviving only as period pieces of an era.

The phrase bunny boiler is derived from the film Fatal Attraction (1987) in which an obsessive, spurned woman, in a fit of frenzied jealousy, boils in a pot the pet rabbit of her erstwhile lover's daughter.  The epithet was coined to refer to women unable to remain rational at the end of a romantic relationship and predictably, is only ever applied to women.  In pre-web times, variations in colloquial language tended to spread more slowly than those powered by the latter-day ubiquity of the net and “bunny boiler” seems not to have entered general use until 1994.  The USENET groups which maintain online archives of such things notes bunny boiler was not used on their (pre-web) platform and while there’s no reliable information about use on the web before 1994, given that non-academic use of the internet then was a tiny fraction of today, such data might anyway not be indicative of general use but nor are there more than a handful of instances in the archives of US and British newspapers before that date.  Indeed, the first recorded instance in print is from an interview the rabbit-slaughtering actress Glenn Close (b 1947) gave to the US magazine Ladies' Home Journal in December 1990 during which she observed "…there's nothing like portraying a psychopathic bunny-boiler to boost one's self-esteem”.  If that was the first publication, that’s a plausible reason why it took so long after 1987 to disseminate and it makes sense because the epithet isn't in the original dialogue or promotional material and nor does it appear in any contemporary review.

Despite that, some sources do say it pre-dates 1990 but provide no evidence and all agree it came into wider use only after 1994 when the web began to assist dissemination, a process similar to that described by epidemiologists to illustrate the progress of viruses which, if achieving critical mass, can become an epidemic… or worse.  Bunny boiler thus began to enjoy a rapidity of infection from 1994, use peaking between 1998-2003, then declining to become stranded in its era.  The explanation offered by etymologists is that too much time elapsed between the source in 1987, the origin of the phrase circa 1990 and the mid-decade adoption so it lacked the newness and novelty these things usually require; its historic moment had passed.  Still, for men it remains useful, any needy, possessive, clingy or even talkative woman can be labelled potential or suspected bunny boiler.

Strands of Lindsay Lohan’s hair in an array of colors.

The idea is of course not new.  For some reason, the (anyway incorrectly quoted) phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is often attributed to Shakespeare, possibly because it’s plausibly in his voice or maybe because for most the only time the Middle English “hath” is seen is in some Shakespearian quote so the association sticks.  The real author however was actually Restoration playwright William Congreve (1670–1729) who coined the phrase for his 1697 play The Mourning Bride, the protagonist of which, although becoming a bit unhinged by the cruel path of doomed love, doesn’t resort to leporidaecide.  Congreve’s line, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” was good but actually was a more poetic rendition of a similar but less elegantly expressed version another playwright had used a year earlier.  The Mourning Bride is also the source of another fragment for which the bard is often given undeserved credit: “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” although that’s often bowdlerized as “Music has charms to soothe a savage beast”.