I had an interesting discussion with my wife the other night. She kept using the phrase “down a rabbit hole” in a way that didn’t really make sense to me. She was using it to mean people (like Trumpers) who start believing an alternate reality and then just continue to get sucked further in. Basically a literal interpretation of Alice going down the rabbit hole.
My understanding and use of “going down a rabbit hole” is one where you start getting sidetracked by tangents until you are significantly far away from where you started. For example reading an article on Wikipedia and there is a link to something semi-related that you follow, and then again on the next page, and so on so that, say you started out reading about the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album and the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of an article about the Crimean War.
So I’m curious how the phrase is used by others.
Maybe I’ve been using it wrong all this time.
I agree with you - that’s what I consider going down a rabbit hole to be. Such as getting lost on YouTube. I go in looking for one thing in particular and pretty soon an hour or so has gone by and I’ve watched 100 funny dog videos!
We use this phrase a lot at work (in a design agency), to mean pursuing an idea which sucks up loads of time, takes you in lots of directions, forcing you to lose sight of the original brief and ultimately leading to a dead end
I think I’ve heard it this way recently, and it makes perfect sense to me. It’s similar to the use in The Matrix (“see how deep the rabbit hole goes”). If things are getting curiouser and curiouser, you’ve gone down the rabbit hole.
They both mean kind of the same thing: getting sucked deeper and deeper into something until you can’t remember where you began. Whether it’s reading Wikipedia articles or reading conspiracy theories.
Both of those uses, but more your wife’s. It means to go get sucked deep into something, to lose your way, and be unable to find your way out. If you’re not trapped, you’re not in a rabbit hole. If you watch 100 cat videos because you’re bored, that’s not a rabbit hole. If you watch 100 cat videos when you really ought to be doing something else, but you just can’t quit because “just one more video won’t hurt,” that’s a rabbit hole.
You don’t need to be in an alternate reality, you just need to be sucked in and trapped somewhere you really shouldn’t be.
I think it’s a combination of both. I listened to the excellent NY Times podcast, Rabbit Hole, and it leans more to your wife’s definition. You start out watching cat videos but end up being a rabid Q-cuckoo.
I use the term all the time when I delve into some area of technolgy. The other day I was trying to understand and fix an elecrical wiring issue with the lights in my home so I did a bit of googling…after many hours I found myself watching videos about the life and times of Edison and his rivlary with Westinghouse and Nikolai Tesla. That was a rabbit hole, thoroughly unproductive and lacking in discipline, perhaps, but nonetheless educational.
I have always thought it to be in quite general use to describe this kind of unproductive behaviour, rather being associated with the lunatic fringe and their paranoid alternative realities.
It is, I like to think, a feature of curious mind rather than one that is deluded.
OP, I think your use of the metaphor is the more usual one.
Something closer to your wife’s meaning might be conveyed by another Carroll reference, Through The Looking Glass:
Although I think this expression must be used sarcastically to convey your wife’s meaning, like the invariably saracastic “wake up sheeple!”. When used literally, it conveys the implication that the bizarre scenario is actually real, not fantasy.
When I encounter the phrase, I think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who went down a rabbit hole into a world where everything is crazy and they think she’s the weird one. Shoeless’s version is more like a real-life rabbit hole. There’s no light down there, and unless you have a rabbit’s nose, you are sure to take some wrong turns and get lost. Alice’s rabbit hole is a literary reference, but Shoeless thinks of a literal rabbit hole.
I feel the two meanings are actually two aspects of the same meaning. They’re both saying you’re becoming separated from reality. One aspect is believing in a false reality made up of conspiracy theories. Another aspect is to become so focused on one thing that you aren’t paying attention to what’s going on around you.