Rabbit (pronounced rab-it)
(1) Any of several soft-furred, large-eared, rodentlike
burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae, allied with the hares and pikas in
the order Lagomorpha, having a divided upper lip and long hind legs, usually
smaller than the hares and mainly distinguished from them by bearing blind and
furless young in nests rather than fully developed young in the open.
(2) Any of various small hares.
(3) The fur of a rabbit or hare, often processed to
imitate another fur.
(4) A runner in a distance race whose goal is chiefly to
set a fast pace, either to exhaust a particular rival so that a teammate can
win or to help another entrant break a record; pacesetter.
(5) In sport, a person poor at a sport; in cricket
specifically, an unskilled batter (also as “batting bunny”, usually clipped to
bunny).
(5) As Welsh rabbit, an alternative form of Welsh rarebit
& Welsh ribbit (A snack made of cheese melted with a little ale and served
on toast). Welsh rabbit was the original
form but was erroneously marked as a corruption in a dictionary published in
1785 although it’s not clear if the editor made the assumption or drew the
conclusion from oral evidence.
(6) In nuclear engineering, a pneumatically-controlled
tool used to insert small samples of material inside the core of a nuclear
reactor.
(7) In computing theory, a large element at the beginning
of a list of items to be bubble sorted, and thus tending to be quickly swapped
into the correct position.
(8) In northern English regional slang, as “rabbit
catcher”, a midwife or one who by force of circumstance assists in the delivery
of a baby.
(9) As “rabbit ears”, the indoor dipole television
antenna which typically sat atop the early analogue sets which received a terrestrial
signal.
(10) Incessantly or nonsensically to talk.
(11) To hunt rabbits.
(12) In US slang, to flee.
1375-1425: From the late Middle English rabet & rabette, from the Anglo-Latin rabettus,
from the Middle French rabouillet (baby
rabbit), from the dialectal Old North French rabotte, probably a diminutive of Middle Dutch or West Flemish robbe (rabbit, seal), of uncertain
origin but which may be an imitative verb (perhaps robben or rubben (to rub))
and used to allude to a characteristic of the animal. The related forms include the French rabot (plane), the Middle Dutch robbe (rabbit; seal (from which Modern
Dutch gained rob (seal (also “rabbit”),
the Middle Low German robbe & rubbe (rabbit), the later Low German Rubbe (seal), the West Frisian robbe (seal), the Saterland Frisian Rubbe (seal) and the North Frisian rob (“seal”) eventually borrowed as the German
Robbe (seal). Early dictionary editors thus described the
word as “a Germanic noun with a French suffix”.
Rabbit is a noun & verb, rabbitiness is a noun, rabbited is a verb, rabbitlike
& rabbity are adjectives and rabbiting is a noun & verb; the noun
plural is rabbits and (especially in the collective) rab·bit.
Until the late nineteenth century, the meaning was exclusively what would now be understood as “a young rabbit” but it came to be used of the whole species, replacing the original coney, owing to the latter's resemblance to and use as a euphemism for cunny (“vulva” and linked obviously with “cunt” although despite that the preferred slang with some zoological allusion came to include “beaver”, “camel toe” and (especially) “pussy”, rather than “bunny”). The noun coney dates from the early thirteenth century and was abstracted from the Anglo-French conis and the Old French coniz, (plurals of conil (long-eared rabbit; (Lepus cunicula)) from the Latin cuniculus, the source also of the Spanish conejo, the Portuguese coelho and the Italian coniglio), the small, Spanish variant of the Italian hare (Latin lepus). The word may ultimately be from the Iberian Celtic although classical writers said it was Hispanic. In Middle English the two forms were cony & conny (the derivations including coning, cunin & conyng) while the Old French had conil alongside conin. The evolution seems to be that the plural form conis (from conil, with the -l- elided) was taken into English and regularly single-ized as cony. The Old French form was borrowed in the Dutch konijn and the German Kaninchen (a diminutive), and is preserved in the surname Cunningham (from a place-name in Ayrshire). Rabbits not being native to northern Europe, there was no Germanic word for them. In the fourteenth century “rabbit” came to describe the young of the species and over the centuries came to supplant coney, a process complete by the early nineteenth. It was another of those exercises in sanitization because in English & Welsh slang, coney had been adopted as a punning synonym for cunny (cunt). That was complicated by it appearing in the Book of Proverbs in the King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611) so the work-around was to change the pronunciation of the original short vowel (rhyming with honey, money) to rhyme with bony, stony. In the Old Testament, the word translates the Hebrew shaphan (rock-badger).
When Volkswagen in 1974 introduced the Golf in the North American market, it was named the Rabbit, apparently because it would thought the name would suggest qualities such as “agility, speed & playfulness” which were positive attributes in what was then (by US standards) a very small car, much smaller than the more recent versions. Because of the international success of the Golf, when the revised model was released in 1983, the North American cars switched to that name and it’s been marketed that way since except between 2003-2008 when the Rabbit badge was revived. The revival was in retrospect a curious choice given the obvious advantages offered by using the one name globally but at the time VW America had a rationalization: “We think we have some opportunities to do something creative with the Rabbit nameplate and recognizes the Golf nameplate has never really caught on with North American consumers as it was overshadowed by the Jetta sedan and wagon. Volkswagen customers want a relationship with their cars and names like The Thing, Beetle, Fox and Rabbit support this." Whatever the opportunities may have been, the linguistic experiment wasn’t continued and since 2009, it’s been Golfs all the way.
US market VW Golfs: 1974 Rabbit L (Generation 1) (left) and 2007 Rabbit TSI (Generation 5).
There was some linguistic irony in VW’s choice because as
the US satirist & critic HL Mencken (1880–1956) pointed out in The American
Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States
(1919): “Zoologically speaking, there are
no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early
colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their
vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it
appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which,
curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.”
The White Rabbit was a character in Lewis Carroll’s
(1832–1898) Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and one which appears often, always in a waistcoat with pocket
watch and in a hurry, fearful always of the impending fury the duchess will visit upon him should he be a moment late. It’s the
white rabbit which Alice follows down the rabbit hole, leading to the bizarre
adventures recounted. One of popular
culture’s best-known rabbits gave rise to the phrase “bunny boiler”, a
reference to the scene in the film Fatal
Attraction (1987) in which a scorned woman revenged herself upon her
adulterous ex-lover by tossing his daughter’s pet rabbit into a pot of boiling
water; he arrives home to discover a boiled bunny. The Warner Brother cartoon character Bugs
Bunny first appeared on the screen in 1938 and is often described by his
shotgun wielding antagonist, the lisping Elmer Fudd, as "that wascally wabbit".
In idiomatic use there’s “pull a rabbit out of the hat” (to find or obtain a sudden solution to a problem), “rabbit-hearted” (someone timid or inclined to be flighty), “rabbit food” (a disapproving view of vegetables held by some meat-eaters), “the rabbit test” (an early pregnancy test involving the injection of the tested woman's urine into a female rabbit, then examining the rabbit's ovaries a few days later for changes in response to a hormone (“the rabbit died” the phrase indicating a positive test or an admission of one’s pregnancy)), “breed like rabbits” (slang for an individual, family, or sub-group of a population with a high birth-rate), “down the rabbit hole” (a time-consuming tangent or detour, often one from which it’s psychologically difficult to extricate oneself), “lucky rabbit’s foot”, (the carrying of a luckless bunny’s preserved rabbit’s foot as a lucky charm), “like a rabbit warren” (a confusingly labyrinthine environment (used literally & figuratively)), “rabbit in the headlights” (an allusion to the way rabbits (like some other wildlife) sometimes “freeze” when caught in the light of an oncoming vehicle’s headlamps) and the inevitable “rabbit fucker” (a general term of disparagement (although it could be applied literally in the right circumstances)).
In May 2011, some weeks after the
meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant which suffered severe damage in
the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, a video of an “earless rabbit” began
to circulate, purportedly captured in an area just beyond the crippled plant’s
exclusion area. The immediate
speculation was of course the creature’s unusual state was a result of a radiation-induced
genetic mutation. Geneticists however
had a less troubling explanation.
Although there’s no doubt the radiation emitting from Fukushima Dai-ichi
(some 225 kilometres (140 miles) north-east of Tokyo) represents a major risk
to health and the long-term environmental effects remain unclear, the
scientists say not only is it unlikely to be linked with the earless rabbit,
such creatures are far from unusual.
According to a statement issued
from Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological
Health Sciences: “…radiation can cause
mutations that can be occasionally expressed as obvious birth defects, such as
shown in the video. However, to say this
is the result of contamination from the Fukushima accident is a stretch,
because natural radiation, as well as many other chemical substances in the
environment and other factors, can also be mutagenic. In most cases, the cause of congenital birth
defects in humans and other animals cannot be determined and as far as science
has shown, there have never been mutations produced by ionizing radiations that
do not occur spontaneously as well.”
Rabbits used in nuclear reactors: Polyethylene 1-inch (25 mm) rabbit (left), Polyethylene 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit (centre) and Titanium 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit.
The rabbit does though have a place in nuclear
engineering. In the industry, the term “rabbit”
is used to describe a range of pneumatically controlled tools which are used remotely
to insert or retrieve items from a nuclear reactor or other radioactive
environments. The name is thought to
come from the devices being tubular (on the model of the rabbit borrow) which
allows samples rapidly to be injected into the periphery of a reactor core, the
injectables moving “with the speed of startled rabbits” although there may also
be the implication of rabbits as expendable creatures, the tool essential for
maintenance, inspection, and repair tasks in nuclear facilities, where direct
human intervention is either dangerous or impossible because of high radiation
levels.
The World War II (1939-1945) era White Rabbit No. 6 was an engineering project by the British Admiralty although as a security measure the official code-name was changed to Cultivator No. 6 to make it sound less mysterious and more like a piece of agricultural equipment. It was a military trench-digging machine and an example of the adage that “generals are always preparing to fight the last war” and although designed exclusively for army use on (and at least partially under) land, it came under the auspices of the Royal Navy because it was a brainchild (one of many) of Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) who, between the outbreak of war in 1939 and his assumption of the premiership some months later, served as First Lord of the Admiralty (the service’s civilian head). Trenches and artillery had been the two dominant features of World War I (1914-1918) and Churchill had spent some months (1915-1916) in one of the former while under fire from the latter while commanding a battalion; before the implications of mechanization and the German’s Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics were apparent, he assumed the new war in France would unfold something like the old, thus the interest in something which would “revolutionize trench warfare”. Trench warfare however wasn’t repeated so White Rabbit No.6 was soon realized to be already obsolete and the project was abandoned and although the most fully developed of the prototypes did perform according to the design parameters, whether it would have been effective remains doubtful; remarkably, work on these things wasn’t wholly abandoned until 1942. The “White Rabbit” project codes came from Churchill’s sense of humor, his ideas coming, as he said: “like rabbits I pull from my hat” and he supported many, some of which were of great military value while others, like the “floating runways” (artificial icebergs made with a mixture of shards of timber & frozen water), were quixotic.
White Rabbit © Copperpenny Music, Mole Music Co
White Rabbit was a song by Grace Slick (b 1939) and released on the album Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane. The lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). It was the psychedelic era and drug references were common in popular music and in the case of White Rabbit it may have been appropriate if the speculation the books been written while the author was under the influence of Laudanum (a then widely-available opiate-infused drug) is true (there's no evidence beyond the circumstantial). Given the imagery in the text, it’s not difficult to believe he may have been on something and among authors and poets it was a popular way to stimulate the imagination, inspiring at least some of one of the most beloved fragments of English verse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) Kubla Khan (1797) which ends abruptly at 54 lines. According to Coleridge, he was unable to recall the rest of the 300-odd which had come to him in an opium-laced dream (the original publication was sub-titled “A Vision in a Dream”) because he was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock” (a nearby Somerset village). Grace Slick would have sympathized with an artist being intruded on by commerce.
White Rabbit lyrics:
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