Where Does The Phrase Bunny Boiler Come From
Bunny boiler meaning. The term “bunny boiler” comes from the James Dearden and Nicholas Meyer film Fatal Attraction, which was released in 1987. In this film, Michael Douglas’s Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) relentlessly pursues her ex-lover, Dan Gallagher. The word stems from a story device in which Forrest boils her former lover’s daughter’s pet rabbit in a fit of rage. When Forrest tried to get Gallagher to meet her and she stated, “Bring the dog, I love animals, I’m a terrific cook,” Gallagher’s suspicions should have been aroused.
When the phrase bunny boiler originally became popular, it referred to someone who was unable to remain sensible following the breakdown of a romantic engagement. That usage was quickly tempered, and it began to be employed in far less extreme contexts, frequently with some irony. Any woman who is clingy, possessive, or even marginally unpleasant is now referred to as a “bunny boiler.”
One of the more striking words to emerge in recent years from the English language is “Bunny boiler meaning”
The phrase is the modern equivalent of the woman referred to in the expression “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned,” which is closely followed by “music has charms to soothe the savage breast,” which comes in second place in the competition for “best-known phrases attributed to Shakespeare that were actually written by someone else.” In his play The Mourning Bride, William Congreve originated both of these expressions in 1697. Only women are supposed to grow deranged as a result of being “dumped,” for reasons that I’ll leave to others to explain; there is no male equivalent of “a woman scorned” or a “bunny boiler.”
We can trace the origins of the word “bunny boiler” because it is a modern term with such a clear source. It wasn’t taken straight from the movie, as the term isn’t spoken in the dialogue or in any of the promotional material.
It’s unclear who invented the phrase, though it could have been Glenn Close. The phrase was first used in print in an interview Close gave to the Ladies’ Home Journal in the United States on December 6, 1990, as reported in the Dallas Morning News.
“Nothing boosts one’s self-esteem like playing a sociopathic bunny-boiler,” Glenn Close tells Ladies’ Home Journal.
Popular terms that have entered the language as a result of the Internet’s development first appeared in online discussion groups, blogs, and online newspapers. USENET groups have the earliest big archive of online colloquial messaging, but “bunny boiler” doesn’t occur there until 1994, and it doesn’t appear more than once or twice in the archives of US or British publications before that period.
The group of people who joyfully accepted the term into their vernacular were street-wise young adults, who aren’t typically expected to read the Ladies’ Home Journal. The expression became ubiquitous on TV reality shows and soap operas.
For example, in a piece about the UK TV show Big Brother, titled Big Brother: Bunny Boiler, written by Danielle Lawler and Emma Cox in August 2004, we find: And the love-struck Stuart Wilson’s legion of female fans has already been warned by Geordie to keep away. She snarled: “When Stu comes out, he won’t even look at another female, so I can be a very jealous girlfriend. I can see how people may mistake me for a bunny. ”
If the term were a commercial product, it would be said that it reached its target market in 1994. From then on, it saw a sudden and broad use, and it became a widely used phrase. The film Fatal Attraction was released in 1987, and Close used the phrase in a 1990 interview. Newly generated phrases appear to move through the community like viruses, float around in the population until they hit a threshold of infected cases, at which point they spread quickly. “Bunny boiler” looks to have reached that position around 1994.
Bunny boiler definition. A dangerous and obsessive former lover who stalks the person who rejected them.
Inspired by a scene in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, in which a disgruntled woman (Glenn Close) seeks revenge on her ex-lover (Michael Douglas) by placing his beloved family cat in a pot of boiling water while he is away from home.
Boiler noun rabbit
Bunny boiler definition. An obsessive girlfriend (or, less usually, a boyfriend), particularly one who has a strong reaction to the termination of a relationship,
Inspired by a scene in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, in which a disgruntled woman (Glenn Close) seeks revenge on her ex-lover (Michael Douglas) by placing his beloved family cat in a pot of boiling water while he is away from home.
A woman who obsessively pursues or monitors her mark, often out of insanity or obsession (stress derangement), A bunny boiler’s mark is a man with whom she has had sex at least once; usually, this man is hardworking and strives for professional and personal success. Plan A and Plan B are the two plans of a bunny boiler.
Plan A: A bunny boiler’s ultimate goal is to fix her mark’s life by interfering, setting him up, and blackmailing him into a dreadful relationship that was never meant to be. The purpose of the bunny boiler is almost certainly doom and gloom, a destiny worse than death. When the first plan fails, the bunny boiler switches to plan B: destruction.
In the film “Fatal Attraction,” after engaging in a steamy hot one-time sex scene with a colleague, Michael Douglas’ character, Glenn Close’s character resorts to boiling her former one-time sex partner’s family pet rabbit in an all-out war aimed at disrupting his life, family, and career and destroying (emphasis on destroy) him for not wanting a sincere man-woman (nuclear family) type relationship with her in an all-out war aimed at disrupting his life, family, and career.