go down a rabbit hole что значит
History of the Idiom “Down the Rabbit Hole”
Recently, i’ve found myself saying “i went down the rabbit hole” an obnoxious amount — which led me to start wondering why we use that term all the time and where it came from — so, here you go.
The first use of the phrase falling “down the rabbit hole” comes to us thanks to the great Lewis Carroll who introduced the term in 1865 in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the story, Alice literally falls down the hole of the White Rabbit, taking her to Wonderland. In this case, falling down the rabbit hole meant entering a strange and absurd alternate universe, which many believe was supposed to represent a psychedelic experience.
For well over a century, the term went unused in common parlance. Until… the internet. The internet gave us infinite things to pique our interest to the point of distraction and unlimited ways to stay trapped in the metaphorical rabbit hole. Today, when people say they “went down the rabbit hole”, they usually mean that they got sucked into spending way to long reading about or researching something on the internet.
But why rabbit hole? Why not “into the spider’s web” or “caught in the beaver’s dam”? In a fantastic piece written in the New Yorker, the author notes:
As a metaphor for our online behavior, the rabbit hole has an advantage those other fictional portals lack: it conveys a sense of time spent in transit. In the original story, Alice falls for quite a while — long enough to scout out the environment, grab some food off a passing shelf, speculate erroneously about other parts of the world, drift into a reverie about cats, and nearly fall asleep. Sounds like us on the Internet, all right. In the current use of “rabbit hole,” we are no longer necessarily bound for a wonderland. We’re just in a long attentional free fall, with no clear destination and all manner of strange things flashing past.
Most uses of “down the rabbit hole” in the modern context fall into a few categories:
It is unclear exactly when or how the term became popularized in the post-internet era (if anyone finds out shoot me a note!) but i’d argue that most platforms are purpose-built to provoke the behavior of, as Alice would say, becoming ‘curiouser and curiouser’, to the point of distraction and loss of time. Just think about Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Google, to name a few. My guess is we’ve all fallen down one of these rabbit holes at least a few times. Now we just have to guess what the next rabbit hole will be!
(Go) Down The Rabbit Hole
Meaning:
1. When someone goes “down the rabbit hole,” it means they spent a lot of time on an activity, perhaps more than they originally intended.
Example: My laptop was having problems, so I began researching online how to fix it. I ended up going down a rabbit hole in the process, wasting hours and hours with no solution in sight until finally, I tried restarting my computer. Now it works fine!
2. A bizarre or strange situation.
Example: I bought a dozen bags of unusually flavored potato chips and I sampled each one. By the end of my tasting session I felt sick; this is not a rabbit hole I plan to go down ever again.
Synonyms / Similar Phrases:
What Is a Rabbit Hole?
Would you ever want to go down a rabbit hole? No, they’re for rabbits! These cute little animals dig holes in the ground to live and sleep in. Why do they live underground? Because it is safer for them; their predators cannot fit into the holes. So when a rabbit is in danger, if their speed isn’t enough to escape their pursuer, they can always retreat to a nearby burrow for safety. No big animal with sharp teeth can get in!
The Origin of ‘Down The Rabbit Hole’
It’s believed that the phrase go down the rabbit hole comes from a 19th century novel called Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (or Alice In Wonderland for short). This novel was written by Lewis Carroll and published in the year 1865.
Near the beginning of this fictional story, a girl named Alice crawls into a rabbit hole. Shortly after, she literally falls down the rabbit hole and ends up in a strange place called Wonderland.
Go down a rabbit hole что значит
A crazy or weird chain of events is about to start. I think it comes from the book ‘Alice in wonderland’ where Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a strange land. Can be positive or negative depending on situation.
Символ показывает уровень знания интересующего вас языка и вашу подготовку. Выбирая ваш уровень знания языка, вы говорите пользователям как им нужно писать, чтобы вы могли их понять.
Мне трудно понимать даже короткие ответы на данном языке.
Могу задавать простые вопросы и понимаю простые ответы.
Могу формулировать все виды общих вопросов. Понимаю ответы средней длины и сложности.
Понимаю ответы любой длины и сложности.
Решайте свои проблемы проще в приложении!
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Hare, rabbit и bunny — это разные животные? Разбираемся в пушистых зверьках
Английский язык богат на слова и идиомы, которые часто путают. Например, hare, rabbit и bunny. Рассказываем, в чем между ними разница и какие выражения с ними связаны.
Слово hare (заяц) берет начало от староанглийского слова hasu, которое означало серый цвет. Зайцев многие часто ошибочно называют rabbit (кролик). Но у этих животных разные повадки, размер ушей и лап. Зайцы предпочитают жить поодиночке, а кролики живут в группах и роют себе норы. В общем, это абсолютно разные животные.
Но с названиями все не так просто: например, калифорнийский заяц (Lepus californicus) по-английски будет jackrabbit. А болотного кролика (swamp rabbit) иногда называют болотным зайцем. Запутаться легко! Особенно школьникам, которым такое на уроках объясняют редко. Чтобы ребенок лучше ориентировался в английском, запишите его в Летнюю школу Skysmart. Там можно не только подтянуть язык, но и подготовиться к новому учебному году!
Для новых учеников у нас есть подарок от наших друзей — при оплате пакета от 8 занятий вы получите 3000 бонусов на карту магазина «Магнит». А если вы оплатите пакет до вводного занятия, то получите 3 бесплатных урока в Skysmart!
Полезные выражения со словами hare и rabbit:
Bunny — это маленький кролик. Название происходит от слова bun, которое в некоторых диалектах использовалось для обозначения как кроликов, так и белок. Bunny может иметь и взрослый подтекст — вспомните тех же самых «Playboy bunnies». А вот dust bunnies ни с женщинами, ни с кроликами совсем не связано — так называют комки пыли.
rabbit hole
What does rabbit hole mean?
Used especially in the phrase going down the rabbit hole or falling down the rabbit hole, a rabbit hole is a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly) surreal state or situation. On the internet, a rabbit hole frequently refers to an extremely engrossing and time-consuming topic.
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Where does rabbit hole come from?
Literally, a rabbit hole is what the animal digs for its home. The earliest written record of the phrase dates back to the 17th century. But the figurative rabbit hole begins with Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In its opening chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” Alice follows the White Rabbit into his burrow, which transports her to the strange, surreal, and nonsensical world of Wonderland.
Since then, Carroll’s rabbit hole has proved a popular and useful reference. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first allusive rabbit hole in a 1938 edition of The Yale Law Journal: “It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange.” Over much of the 20th century, rabbit hole has been used to characterize bizarre and irrational experiences. It’s especially used to reference magical, challenging, and even dangerous places or positions, similar to Carroll’s topsy-turvy Wonderland.
Rabbit hole has many metaphorical applications—from frustrating red tape to the mind-bending complexity of science to hallucinations during altered states—all united by a common sense of passing into some labyrinthine, logic-defying realm that, once entered, is hard to get out of. One can fall down the rabbit hole of government bureaucracy, healthcare, obtaining a green card, tax law, the political economy of modern Japan, puberty, college admissions, or quantum mechanics.
If you’re Neo in the hit film The Matrix, you can take the red pill—a pill that shows you the truth, as opposed to the blue pill, which keeps you in ignorance—and “see how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In a related note, some people literally take pills and go down the rabbit hole of a psychedelic drug trip.
But as Kathryn Schulz observed for The New Yorker in 2015, rabbit hole has further evolved in the information age: “These days…when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction—usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit.”
Thanks to the abundance, variety, and instant access of content online, many fall down internet rabbit holes which are often spectacularly, and addictively, niche: scary stories, obscure conspiracy theories, or famous last meals, for instance.