Rabbit

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.

Lindsay Lohan with rabbit.

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)).

The “earless” rabbit with “eared” companions.

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.

Winston Churchill inspecting the progress of project White Rabbit No, 6, Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, England, November 1941.

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

Surrealistic Pillow album cover, 1967.

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:

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice

When she's ten feet tall

 

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

Call Alice

When she was just small

 

When the men on the chessboard

Get up and tell you where to go

And you've just had some kind of mushroom

And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice

I think she'll know

 

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead

And the White Knight is talking backwards

And the Red Queen's off with her head

Remember what the dormouse said

Feed your head

Viscacha or vizcacha

Viscacha or vizcacha (pronounced vi-skah-chuh)

A gregarious burrowing hystricomorph rodent (Lagostomus maximus), of the genera Lagidium and Lagostomus, within family Chinchillidae, about the size of a groundhog, inhabiting the pampas of Paraguay and Argentina and allied to the smaller chinchilla, also from the family Chinchillidae.  It’s known also at the mountain viscacha, a related rodent of the genus Lagidium (of the Andes), about the size of a squirrel, having rabbit-like ears and a squirrel-like tail.

1595–1605: From the Spanish viscacha from Quechua wisk’acha or Quechuan wiskácha.  The Spanish Quechua is from qhichwa (literally “temperate valley”).  With use depending on prevailing practice, both the spellings viscacha & vizcacha are used in various branches of biology and zoology, the older alternatives biscacha, biscacho & bizcacha now rare except in historic citation.  The noun plural is viscachas and the derived term is viscachera (plural viscacheras), a warren inhabited by viscachas.

Vizcacha moments: Time for the world weary to take a nap; Lindsay Lohan joining a viscacha in a yawn.

The viscachas or vizcachas, of which there are five extant species, are rodents of the genera (Lagidium and Lagostomus) within the family Chinchillidae.  Native to South America, despite looking similar to rabbits or hares, they’re not related to either and are thus of interest to evolutionary biologists because they’re an example of convergent evolution.  When biologists first saw the viscacha they noted the question of heritage: mammals part of the Leporidae family (rabbit) or the Chinchillidae family (Chinchilla)?  Sharing the large ears, powerful hind legs, and small front paws, Vizcachas do bear a striking resemblance to the rabbit family but are distinguished by their long bushy tail, a trait unique to the Chinchillidae family.  Helpful for biologists as a species indicator, for the small rodent, it’s a marker of their state of mind, the tail is extended when distressed and curled when at ease.

Residing throughout southern and western South America, they tend to stay close to their underground burrows but possess surprising dexterity as climbers, able to jump from rock to rock so effortlessly and with such alacrity observers report their progress is hard to track with the naked eye.  They live in colonies that can be barely a dozen or number in the hundreds and have acquired an extensive repertoire of vocalizations used in social interactions.  Small they may be but Vizcachas are voluble and, belying their sleepy appearance, are noted for their gregarious behavior.

Up to two feet (.6 m) in length and weighing typically around 3.5 lbs (1.6 kg), Vizcachas are relatively large by rodent standards but are small compared to their carnivorous neighbors, the Puma and Culpeo Fox.  These two are fierce predators but the fast, agile Vizcacha has the advantage of inhabiting a mountainous environment littered with boulders and rocks which is difficult hunting ground so doesn’t suffer greatly from predation induced population decline.  The main threat is humans, less from the habitat loss which threatens some species but because of illegal hunting for their meat and fur, luxury items in some markets.

There are spiritual traditions in which exists the concept of the spirit animal, a creature the spirit of which is said to help guide or protect a person on a journey and the characteristics of which that person shares or embodies.  The apparently ancient concept is prominent in a number of indigenous (notably Native American) religions and cultures and was embraced by Pagan and Wiccan communities as recently as the 1990s and the term totem was sometimes used.  Totem was from the Native North American Ojibwe ᑑᑌᒼ or ᑑᑌᒻ (doodem) and referred to a sacred object, symbol or spirit and in a sense can be thought of as the equivalent of a flag (in the case of a tribe) or coat of arms (in the case of a clan).  The word totem became widely used by anthropologists when discussing cultural practices in many places (and not just in North America).  In academic use where it's a neutral descriptor this is usually not controversial but in general use it can be a form of cultural misappropriation.  In the West, the idea of spirit animals was picked up in the weird world of the new age, dolphins and other charismatic creatures predictably popular.  The concept turned out also to have appeal to some among the less spiritual who adopted the viscacha as their spirit animal because there is seemingly no living thing on earth with an appearance which so encapsulates the qualities of the melancholic, world-weariness and the need to take a nap.

Vizcacha moments: Jiang Zemin (1926–2022; General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (and thus paramount leader) 1989-2002 & President of the People's Republic of China (PRC) 1993-2003), resting his eyes during one of the less interesting speeches delivered as part of the otherwise riveting proceedings of the nineteenth congress of the CCP, Beijing, October 2017.  It’s said Mr Jiang, sometime during his second term as paramount leader, adopted the viscacha as his spirit animal.

Redux

Redux (pronounced ri-duhks)

Brought back; resurgent.

1650-1660: From the Classical Latin redux (that leads or brings back; led or brought back (as from war or exile)) a noun derivative (with passive sense) of redūcere (to bring back) from redūcō (to bring back).  Modern use tends to be post-positive, especially of an artistic work, presented in either a novel or different way.  It has been used in the titles of books and other literary works since at least 1662 since John Dryden’s (1631-1700) Astraea Redux (A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Second Majesty Charles II (1660)).

The literary use of redux as a post-positive adjective meaning "brought back, restored" began with John Dryden’s (1631-1700) Astraea Redux (A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Second Majesty Charles II (1660)) and other notable examples include Anthony Trollope's (1815-1882) Phineas Redux (1873), the sequel to Phineas Finn (1867); and John Updike's (1932-2009) Rabbit Redux (1970), the second in his sequence of novels about the character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  Perhaps rather cynically, it was adopted too by film producers who noted the unused footage of many commercially many successful products (the industry phrase being “left on the cutting room floor”) and worked out it’d be a cheap exercise to create “director’s cuts”, marketed as a “new interpretation” of an existing work.

Dexfenfluramine, a serotonergic anorectic drug, was an appetite suppressant marketed as dexfenfluramine hydrochloride under the name Redux.  It worked by increasing extracellular serotonin in the brain and was structurally similar to an amphetamine but without the psychologically stimulating effects.  In September 1997, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked the manufacturer voluntarily to withdraw dexfenfluramine (Redux) and fenfluramine (Pondimin) from the market.  It was an unusual request and one necessitated because of a high incidence of cardiac valvular abnormalities found in patients who were taking the drugs.  Dexfenfluramine had been approved by the FDA in 1996 and had been widely used for the treatment of obesity while Fenfluramine had been available for 20 years but gained wide notoriety only when it was coupled with phentermine in the "fen-phen" combination.  Phentermine was not implicated in the heart valve abnormalities and is still available.  Dexfenfluramine and fenfluramine produced a distal axotomy of brain serotonin neurons in experimental animals, a toxicity which resulted in reduced brain serotonin axonal markers that persisted for months and, in one primate study, as long as one year after discontinuing the drug.  The doses of drug that produce this effect are similar to those used in humans although this effect has never been demonstrated in humans.  The demise of Redux thus ended the "fen-phen" era in diet pills but was soon replaced with a new fad combining fluoxetine (Prozac) with phentermine.

Attaché

Attaché (pronounced a-ta-shey, at-uh-shey or uh-tash-ey)

(1) A diplomatic official attached to an embassy or legation, especially in a technical capacity (often as a commercial attaché, cultural attaché etc).

(2) A military officer who is assigned to a diplomatic post in a foreign country in order to gather military information (historically usually as air attaché; army attaché; naval attaché, military attaché).

(3) As attaché case, a type of briefcase intended for carrying documents.

1825–1835: From the French attaché (plural attachés, feminine attachée), (junior officer attached to the staff of an ambassador (literally “attached”)), noun use of the past participle of attacher (to attach), from the Old French atachier, a variant of estachier (bind), from estache (stick), from the Frankish stakka (stick) (which was cognate with the Old Occitan estacha, the Italian stacca and the Spanish estaca, from the Gothic stakka).  The attaché case (small leather case for carrying papers) dates from circa 1900.  English, typically, picked up attaché unaltered from the French (although the spelling attache is now common) as did German, Polish and Swedish but other languages adapted as was suited by tradition or pronunciation including Georgian (ატაშე (aṭaše)), Russian (атташе́ (attašé)), Serbo-Croatian (ataše) and Turkish (ataşe).  In sardonic diplomatic humor, attaché was long regarded as a euphemism for “spy” and that, the humor and the practice, remains afoot.  Attaché is a noun and the noun plural is attachés (use in attaché case is not adjectival).

The attaché case and the briefcase.

Meme of Lindsay Lohan in court, Los Angeles, 2013.

A Lindsay Lohan court appearance in Los Angeles in 2013 attracted the usual commentary (choice of hairstyle, clothes, shoes etc) but the attaché case carried by her lawyer inspired the meme community to create a spoof Louis Vuitton advertisement.  The mock-up, which appeared on the now defunct danielpianetti.com, used a courtroom image in which Ms Lohan’s seemed transfixed, eyes focused on the attaché case recumbent on the defense table.

Lawyer Mark Jay Heller with attaché case and rabbit’s foot.

Ms Lohan was represented by celebrity lawyer Mark Jay Heller (b 1945) who gained fame from representing “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz (b 1953) before becoming a staple of the paparazzi business and he recently resigned from the New York bar due to professional misconduct.  In 2013, his attaché case was notable for the white rabbit's foot key chain attached to the handle which Mr Heller said brought him good luck.  On 17 March 2022, a New York state appeals court accepted his resignation from the bar after he admitted several counts of misconduct including failing to communicate with one client and neglecting another.  The subject of a disciplinary investigation, he acknowledged to the court he had no defense to offer.  Luck had run out.  Mr Heller’s attaché case was a Louis Vuitton Serviette Conseiller Monogram Robusto, fabricated with a cross grain calf leather interior & a natural cowhide handle (part-number M53331).  It's no longer available but a similar item, suitable for tablets and smaller laptops is the Porte-Documents Voyage PM Monogram Macassar Canvas (part-number M52005) at US$1950.

The attaché case and briefcase have not dissimilar histories.  In the diplomatic establishment, attachés were originally junior members of staff (their dual role as covers for spying swiftly a parallel career path) who fulfilled administrative duties which included carrying the ambassador’s papers in as slim case which came to be known as an attaché case.  In the legal community, a brief was a summary of facts and legal positions supporting arguments in judicial proceedings, prepared by a solicitor and provided to the advocate who was to appear in court.  The “brief case” was originally a wooden box in the chambers of barristers in which the bound briefs were deposited but by the early twentieth century it had come to be used to describe the small, rigid bags which had become the usual device used by lawyers to carry stuff to court.  These quickly became an almost obligatory accessory for businessmen either successful or wishing to appear so and they remained part of the informal uniform until the 1990s when laptops and later tablets & smartphones began to supplant paper.  The look remains admired however and high-end laptop bags use many of the design cues from the briefcase, even down to that signature touch of the 1970s, the dual combination locks.

Between manufacturers, there’s no agreement on when the attaché case ends and the briefcase begins but it seems the attaché case is a small, slender suitcase which opens into two distinct and usually symmetrical compartments, made from leather or metal and definitely without a shoulder strap.  By contrast, a briefcase is a flat, rectangular container which opens to reveal one large compartment although the “lid” is likely to have pockets or gussets that expand to accommodate pens, phones and such, generating flexible storage functionality.  Historically a briefcase would not include a shoulder strap but many are now so equipped suggesting the laptop bag is a descendent of the briefcase rather than the attaché case.  For that reason, the attaché case would seem to be thought something slim and stylish while a briefcase must be bigger to accommodate not only documents but also the electronic devices of the modern age including accessories such as charges, power cords and cables.  Other manufactures however claim an attaché case is actually bigger than a briefcase and always includes a shoulder strap but this view seems unfashionable and may relate more to their product differentiation and naming conventions.  However, for those not bothered by fine distinctions in such matters, using the terms interchangeably will likely confuse few.

Although probably thought by many to be something which exists only in the imagination of spy novels, briefcase guns really have been a thing and along with other innovations like the poison-tipped umbrella, there are documented cases of them being used by Warsaw Pact counter-intelligence services.  Remarkably, though unsurprisingly, briefcase guns are available for purchase in the US and can in some jurisdictions lawfully be carried (being luggage this is most literal) provided it’s first registered under the National Firearms Act as an Any Other Weapon (AOW), the relevant clause being 26 U.S.C. § 5845(E): Any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive.

In this example, the weapon is a Heckler & Koch MP5 (Maschinenpistole 5), a 9x19mm Parabellum submachine gun, developed in the 1960s and there have been dozens of versions, both automatic and semi-automatic.  Widely used around the world by both the military and in law enforcement, the MP5 has survived the introduction of its supposed successor (the UMP) and remain popular, a familiar tale in military hardware.  The MP5K (the K stands for kurz (short)) is locked into a claw mount with the muzzle connected to a tubular firing port.  Loading a magazine is said to be a clumsy operation with the MP5 in place but is possible although it’s noted the recommended 30-round clip is a tight fit, barely clearing the bottom of the case.  The trigger is conveniently located in the handle and connected with a mechanical linkage.  There’s a knurled button on the handle which functions as a kind of external safety catch because the fire mode is set prior to closing the case and spent shells are deflected downward so they can’t cause a malfunction by bouncing into the action.  Within, there’s a holder for a spare magazine and the briefcase is lockable (which seems a sensible feature).  It’s said to take some practice to achieve anything like the accuracy one could attain with a conventionally held MP5 but for the section of the target market which wants a sudden, rapid fire over a wide field, it’s presumably ideal.

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”.

Fedora

Fedora (pronounced fi-dawr-uh or fed-dohr-uh)

A soft felt or velvet hat with a curled medium-brim, usually with a band and worn with the crown creased lengthwise.

1887: An invention of American English, from Fédora, an 1882 play by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908), the protagonist of which was the Russian princess Fédora Romanoff, played originally by Sarah Bernhardt.  Bernhardt, a noted cross-dresser, wore a center-creased, soft brimmed hat which was adopted by feminists of the age, then known as women's-rights activists.  The name comes from the Russian Федо́ра (Fedóra), feminine form of Фёдор (Fjódor), from the Ancient Greek Θεόδωρος (Theódōros) (gift of god), derived from θεός (theós) (god) and δῶρον (dôron) (gift).  The ultimate root was the Indo-European dhes- (forming words for religious concepts) + dōron (gift) from do- (to give)).

In the Western world, between the demise of the top hat after the First World War and the abandonment of hats in the 1960s, three variations on a theme, the Fedora, the Trilby and the Homburg vied for choice as men’s headgear, all popular in a way the bowler hat never was.  Fedoras used to be made mostly from wool, cashmere, rabbit or beaver felt, some of the more expensive varieties blended with mink or chinchilla (and rarely mohair, vicuña, guanaco or cervelt).  After enjoying a 1990s revival, they came to be made from any available material, including modern synthetics.

The Trilby (left), Homburg (centre) and the Fedora (right).

The Fedora first became fashionable during the 1920s, displacing the less rakish Homburg (named after Homburg in Imperial-era Germany from where it originated as hunting headgear) although it was the similar, though narrow-brimmed, Trilby (also known in the UK as the “Brown Trilby”) which was said to be more popular with the rich.  The Trilby proved attractive to those often at the track, apparently because, with a narrow brim and one slightly turned up at the back, it made more convenient the carrying of a pair of binoculars.  The name Trilby was derived from a hat worn in the stage adaptation of George du Maurier's (1834-1896) 1894 novel Trilby.  Just another hat in most countries, it suffered by association in Germany because a black Trilby was the choice of most Gestapo officers.

Lindsay Lohan wearing Fedora with coat of unknown provenance, Chiltern Firehouse, London, 2014.

The Homburg did make a mid-century comeback after it became the choice of the UK's pre-war foreign secretary Anthony Eden (1897-1977; UK prime-minister 1955-1957).  The highly strung Eden was the most stylish politician of the age, although his sartorial elegance failed to impress the Duce, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943) noting he had “…never met a better dressed fool.”  It was his colleague Rab Butler (1902–1982) who, noting the character of Eden's parents, reckoned genetics could explain why Eden was "half mad baronet, half beautiful woman" and he understood that something as distinctive as a hat could convey a political message if the association was widely understood.  At the time when the great dividing line in British politics was the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940; UK prime-minister 1937-1940), Eden was replaced as foreign secretary by the pro-appeasement Lord Halifax (1881–1959; UK Foreign Secretary 1938-1940), Butler becoming his under-secretary.  One thing an under-secretary gets allocated is a parliamentary private secretary (PPS), a member of parliament (MP) keen to stake a claim to advancement and on his first day in the Foreign Office (FO), Butler took the PPS to a quiet corner and told him to discard his homburg since it was "too Edenesque" and to "buy a bowler", the hat almost always worn by Halifax.  The PPS had no great regard for Eden and had adopted the homburg merely because he liked the look but anyway took the advice, delighted to be unexpectedly appointed a FO PPS, noting in his diary "...just think, bowlers are back".