RABBIT, n. My baby learned to say this word. Actually, he learned to say “babbit,” which is even better.
Did you know that children simplify words they can’t pronounce in consistent, predictable ways? As in, not all kids employ the same rules, but each individual kid settles on their own method and then sticks to it. Common approaches are deleting consonants or even entire syllables, substituting sounds—especially to make some of them the same, as in “babbit”—or swapping the order of sounds. It’s so cool. It’s also why, if you hang out with a toddler a lot, you can start to understand what they’re saying, even when it doesn’t have much connection to the word as it’s usually said. My kid, for instance, loves a board book about neighbors, but cannot say “neighbor” and has invented “may-me” (in IPA, [meɪmi]) as a replacement. You might notice those words don’t have a lot of sounds in common! Through context and repetition, the kid makes himself clear.
Anyway, back to babbits. These small mammals are plentiful in baby books and also in my neighborhood, and what I really wanted to know was why we say “bunny rabbit,” but I got sidetracked.
“Rabbit” turned out to be both biologically and etymologically more complicated than expected. First problem: we use this word to refer to many different species of the family Leporidae, which also includes hares, but rabbits didn’t live in the British isles back in the days when the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons were naming animals. The European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, is native to the Iberian peninsula and a small part of North Africa. (Finding rabbits where rabbits should not be was a recurring motif of my reading. Oryctolagus cuniculus absolutely does not belong in South America, Australia, or New Zealand, but alas, there they are. And Sylvilagus floridanus, the eastern cottontail, native to the meadows of eastern North America, Central America, and the very northernmost parts of South America, should not be devouring all the purple coneflower in my garden. That destructive privilege ought to belong to Sylvilagus transitionalis, the New England cottontail, which has been nearly driven out by the invaders.)
Rabbits have been raised as livestock for a long time, and people import their livestock, so English imported some names for these critters. “Rabbit” came from an Anglo-Norman word, and probably from Walloon or Dutch before that. Originally it meant the animal’s young.
The adults used to be called “coneys,” and maybe sometimes still are, depending on which English you speak. But sometime in the 19th century, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary,
British slang picked up coney as a punning synonym for cunny "cunt" (compare connyfogle "to deceive (a woman) in order to win sexual favors"). The word was in the King James Bible (Proverbs xxx.26, etc.), however, so it couldn't be entirely dropped, and the solution was to change the pronunciation of the original short vowel (rhyming with honey, money) to rhyme with bony, stony.
Amazing how often we end up back at “cunt,” really. But I’m most impressed by the detail that because the word “coney” was in the King James Bible, people deliberately changed its pronunciation to avoid the sexual connotation.
As for “bunny,” that too used to be a word for the animal’s young. But I guess rabbits are small enough and cute enough that they’re all babies to us. “Bunny” used to be “bun,” but we don’t really know where that came from. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “etymology unknown” and “not very likely” to be connected to the Scottish word “bun” for the tail of a hare (and sometimes, metaphorically, the tail of a human), but the Online Etymology Dictionary doesn’t share that pessimism. “Bun” is also a term of endearment for a woman or a child, especially in Scottish English, and that is definitely connected to bunnies.
A bonus etymology: here is NPR’s Codeswitch on the word “goober,” which comes from the Kikongo word for peanut, “nguba.”
These small-r romance novels don’t contain any rabbits. If I were really clever, I would have read a bunch of erotic romance this month so I could tell you “here are some characters who fuck like bunnies,” but I am not and did not. There is sex in both of these books, but in both cases it’s preceded by months of pining, which, as far as I know, rabbits don’t do.
We Could Be So Good (bi m/gay m, both cis, historical) by Cat Sebastian. This is set in New York City in 1958 and it is delicious. Both main characters are reporters and the struggling leftist newspaper where they work is such a presence in the book. They cover Civil Rights marches and nuclear protests and Robert Moses fucking up NYC—and they live the burgeoning gay liberation movement, discussing a real Village Voice article called “Revolt of the Homosexual” and quietly, defiantly constructing domestic happiness for themselves, even under the shadow of violent retribution from the police. That makes this book sound very tense and gritty, but please believe me that it is actually about falling in love with your best friend because he took you in after your fiancée dumped you and then you saw him shave and it turned you bisexual. Also, they make each other soup and it’s wildly romantic.
Office Hours (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Katrina Jackson. This is set at a small university in the US Midwest and it gets every detail so right—Jackson is a professor in real life—that even though many of the correct details are things like “trying to surreptitiously grade quizzes during a faculty meeting” and “organizing all your references instead of actually writing your article” and “being so tired and stressed out all the time,” it somehow made me nostalgic for working in academia. Deja Evans is a professor of sociology working toward tenure, and as a young Black woman, she feels tremendous pressure to excel in her research, say yes to every committee assignment, and mentor her students of color, even though none of the senior faculty in her department are mentoring her. She’s drowning in work and on the verge of burnout—until she connects with Alejandro Mendoza, a professor of history who inspires her to take a little time for herself. This is very sexy and all the little caretaking gestures he offers her are swoonworthy. Almost all the conflict here comes from their demanding jobs and difficult colleagues, and it’s so satisfying to watch Deja blossom and get both what she needs and what she wants. Deja’s friends and students totally won my heart as supporting characters, too.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Sanders, which is a wonderfully weird piece of literary fiction narrated by a teenage ghost haunting the Mallorcan monastery where George Sand, her children, and Frédéric Chopin live for a few months in the 1830s. The ghost, Blanca, has a tragic life story and has witnessed the tragedies of many other women in the centuries she’s been alive, but she’s also very funny and satisfyingly vengeful. And she has an instant, overpowering crush on George Sand. I loved the narrative device here—Blanca can touch people and know what they’re thinking or feeling, and also see their futures if she wants, so we get to see everyone’s perspective on this excursion, and feel both the children’s yearning to be the center of their mother’s attention and George Sand’s desperate need for everyone to please stop asking her for stuff so she can fucking write. This book is what people call “slice of life,” I guess, meaning it’s more day to day than driven by a plot, but it’s the strangest possible slice.
I accidentally took a month off from writing this newsletter, oops. But I will be back in your inbox in two weeks with the best kind of historical trivia—and will hopefully have managed to read my library books by then.