Tag Alias: bunny -> rabbit, etc.

Posted under General

Granola said: If we have bunny_ears and bunny_girl and bunnysuit, its more logical to assume that the actual animal will be marked as "bunny" here.

That's a bit of an issue. I think bunny for the animal sounds a bit dumb and would much prefer rabbit, but as Hillside points out, rabbitsuit and rabbit_girl would be pretty silly. And I prefer bunny_ears to rabbit_ears, maybe because the latter makes me think of old TVs.

Honestly, I when tagging I don't think of them as waseieigo, but rather just as plain old English words. Originating more with Playboy than anything Japanese, so their use in Japanese wasn't factoring in for me.

I agree, I never thought of bunnysuit or bunny_girl as being anything more than directly borrowed words from English with the same meanings.

In fact the OED has as the definition:

bunny 2.d:

In full bunny girl. A night-club hostess, or the like, dressed in a costume which is partly imitative of a rabbit. Also attrib.

Shinjidude said:
Is there a convincing reason to change it except that "rabbit" is more formal than "bunny"?

That's reason enough for me. We don't call cats kitties or dogs doggies, why should we call rabbits bunnies?

One reason "bunny" sounds more natural here is that, in stuffed animal form, rabbits are almost exclusively referred to as bunnies, unless they are rendered extremely realistically. I saw a number of takes on the White Rabbit while looking through the alice_(wonderland) tag today, and those that weren't bunnygirls were anthropomorphic in the same way that stuffed bunnies commonly are. This stylistic tendency is probably going to apply to most of the rabbits we'll see here. It seems natural to call them bunnies as well.

And, of course, most of the rabbits on the site are likely to be in the presence of young girls, so the cute connotation of the word "bunny" brings it closer to the forefront of the mind.

As for rabbit_ears, that just makes me think of the kind shown in post #381651...

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