I occasionally make these amazing cookies (people have called them a “spiritual experience.”) It’s a pretty normal chocolate chip cookie recipe with toasted pecans, only I replace about 1/3 cup flour with an equal amount of Turkish-ground coffee. The cookies are chewy and almost bitter, and the coffee aroma is all over your head.
I’ve always called them Rabbit Punch cookies, “because eating too many is like a blow to the kidneys.” I’m another person glad to hear that rabbit punches can be kidney blows, because otherwise my lame joke would have been even lamer.
Yeah. It sounds to me like that is one of those things, the name of which I can’t recall, where a modern explanation is retrofitted to an old term. I’ve seen the actual motion from rabbits grabbed from the front where they’ll rapidly kick with their back legs in unison. So it’s an apt description. But the technical term, as a blow to the back of the neck makes more sense as a way to dispatch a rabbit.
Thanks. Backronym led me to retronym, and false etymology. None of those are exactly the right term, leaving only urban legendas the term that fits. Urban legend connotes something more to me, usually a moralistic story or something. But this is like the etymology of honeymoon or rule of thumb, which is also covered under urban legends. I feel like it should have it’s own word. How about neotymology?
ETA: And of course, there should be some fictional etymology for neotymology.
Ha! I’ll leave that to a more learned Doper. I only came across the term a couple of years ago and had to google it. Not exactly common parlance - at least in my circles. YMMV.
To kill them, perhaps? The object of a throat punch, or the hazard of one if you don’t intend to kill someone, is to fracture the hyoid bone and cause the throat to swell and close the airway. I hear it stops the fight pretty quickly. Plus, if you manage to not break it, it hurts like hell–also a good way to get someone to rethink the wisdom of continuing a fight.
I’d have said donkey and I think it should have been an acceptable answer. Rabbit was the second answer that came to mind.
VG.
It was advertised on allthe bus-stops near my house. My daughter (aged about ten) kept asking what it meant. I made up an explanation (something like ‘punching so hard it’s like you’ve been kicked by a donkey’) but she never remembered. So every time we passed those bloody bus stops, for months after the film stopped showing, I had to lie about donkey punching again.
But at least it means that if a future sexual partner asks her to participate in one, she’ll say no. If she remembers.
I read a short story in, I think, 6th grade (circa 1974 or 75) called “The Rabbit Punch”, in which a kid accidentally kills his classmate by punching him in the neck. That’s how I know the term. If memory serves, the punch was to the side of the neck, below the ear.
Anybody else remember this story? A bit of googling turned up someone asking about it on Yahoo, but I found no further information. Something about it has stuck with me all these years.
