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) 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).
Lindsay Lohan with white rabbit.
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".known today.
The "rabbits ears" headrests : 1967 Mercedes-Benz 600 (with "jam rolls", left), 1969 Mercedes-Benz 600 (with "croissants" (better known as "rabbits ears"), centre) and 1990 Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL (with boring "headrests", right).
Mercedes-Benz introduced their Kopfstütze (literally “head support” although in the factory’s technical documents the design project was the Kopfstützensystem (head restraint system)) when the 600 (W100, 1963-1981) was displayed at the 1963 Frankfurt Motor Show, the early cars having only a rear-pair as standard equipment (there was an expectation many 600s would be chauffeur-driven) with the front units optional but the hand-built 600 could be ordered with one, two, three or four Kopfstützen (or even none although none seem to have be so-configred ordered). In 1969 the design was updated and over three weeks the new type was phased in for the models then in production. While a totally new design (one cognizant of the US safety regulations which had mandated them for the front seats of passenger vehicles) with a different internal structure and mounting assembly, the most distinctive aspect was the raised sides which some compared to the “pagoda” roof then in use on the W113 (230, 250 & 280 SL, 1963-1971) roadster but this was coincidental. In the early press reports the shapes were described with culinary references, the previous versions said to resemble a Biskuitrolle mit Marmelade (jam filled sponge roll) while the new generation was more like a croissant. In the English-speaking world, neither term caught on, the older style was called something like “older style” while the new came to be known as “rabbits ears” which was much more charming. Uncharmed, the humorless types at the factory continued to call them teilt (split) or offener Rahmen (open-frame). The “rabbits ears” were phased out in 1979 although the low volume 600 retained them (along with the archaic rear swing-axles!) until the last was built in 1981. The design introduced in 1979 seems never to have been compared to any kind of food and it reverted to lateral symmetry although the structure was noticeably more vertiginous.
1964 Mercedes-Benz 300 SE Coupe (left) and 1971
Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet (right): The elegant simplicity of the older gear selector knob (left) gave way to the
newer (eye-socket safe, right), as did the robust sliding heater controls, replaced by more fragile pieces, designed deliberately to "give way" if sufficient force was applied. Unfortunately, as phased running-change in 1967-1968, the timber
veneer seen over the 300 SE's instrument binnacle was replaced by a leather covering.
The Kopfstützensystem was one of a number of mid-century "safety projects" Mercedes-Benz undertook, the best known of which were developed in the 1950s: the Sicherheitsfahrgastzelle (literally "safety passenger cell") and Knautschzonen (crumple zones), both long standard features in automotive design. Another was the then untypically large gear selector level introduced in 1971, the shape a product of analysing data from the Swedish government's mandatory post mortems (autopsies) of road-accident fatalities (under Swedish law, such corpses were for 48 hours the property of the state). What the pathologists' findings revealed was lives could be saved if engineers could devise as a shift lever handle too large to penetrate the eye socket. While there's an element of the macabre in such research and it wasn't something the factory choose widely to publicize, the design was a classic example of what's called "passive safety".
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
happier times: Bashar al-Assad (b 1965; ophthalmologist and Syria dictator
2000-2024, left), Mr Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; b 1952; president or
prime minister of Russia since 1999, centre) and His Beatitude John X (b 1955; primate
of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All The East since 2013,
right), Patriarchal Reception Room, St Mary’s Cathedral, Damascus, Syria,
January, 2020.
Before Bashar al-Assad fled
the country, the security forces (a numerous and busy body) in Syria were
regarded, even by the standards of the region, as particularly brutal,
illustrated by one joke which circulated: “An Israeli from the Mossad [Institute for Intelligence and Special
Operations], a Iranian from the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps] and a Syrian from the SRG [Syrian Republican Guard, better known as the Presidential
Guard] are sent into the forest to catch a rabbit for dinner. After some time, the Israeli returns and
reports: ‘There are no rabbits, only hares.’
Shortly afterwards, the Iranian returns and reports: ‘There are no
rabbits, only hares.’ For an hour they
wait but the Syrian doesn’t return so the go into the forest to find him. They come upon him, crouched over a bloodied
hare he is beating with his fists while shouting: ‘Admit it, you’re a
rabbit!'" Whether the reputation of Syria's security forces improves now the place is under new management remains to be seen although the early indications are there may be some risk of plus ça change. Ex-president
al-Assad is now, in reduced circumstances, living in exile in Moscow under the
protection of Mr Putin, perhaps not the most reassuring status for someone with
potential value as a tradable commodity.
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 written by Grace Slick (b 1939) and released on the album Surrealistic Pillow (1967) by Jefferson Airplane, the lyrics inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). It was the psychedelic era, a time when 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 and popular 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 common resort 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 vile 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
