April 29, 2006

The Rabbit Died

Recently, a good friend lost her rabbit. I called to console her and reminded her what it means when the "Rabbit Dies". I thought she might find this amusing since she and her husband have talked about getting pregnant with their second child.
I mentioned the rabbit died term to several friends who would give me blank stares. "What does it mean when the rabbit dies?" I was amazed that so many people haven't heard this saying. It then came up at the Weekly Family Dinner and even my Dad hadn't heard the saying. Mom and I looked at each other in amazement.
Of course I had to Google.it:

The phrase, "The rabbit died," came to be a euphemism for a positive pregnancy test in the late 1920 and early 1930s. Around 1927 it was discovered that if you injected the urine of a pregnant woman into a rabbit, there would be corpora hemorrhagica in the ovaries of the rabbit. These bulging masses on the ovaries could not be seen with out killing the rabbit to inspect the ovaries, so invariably, every rabbit died, even if the woman wasn't pregnant.
My friend, who lost her rabbit, called me this morning inquiring about my date and then proceeded to tell me "The Rabbit Died!"