EPIC Mulvaney Presser

On a detour from a detour, the name “Coney Island” is interesting from an etymology standpoint. England used to be a Saxon nation, and its people spoke a Germanic Saxon language. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, its rulers spoke French, a Latin-based language.
This lead to a standard pattern in English — refined foods have Latinic names, while raw foods have Germanic names. You butcher a cow (Germanic), to get a sirloin (Latinic). You kill a deer (Germanic), to get venison (Latinic). Your servants eat gruel (Germanic) and serve you blancmange (Latinic) after dinner. The starving peasants eat weeds (Germanic), while the aristocracy has salads (Latinic) of lettuce (Latinic).
So, you would think the standard word for a living lagomorph might be “hare” (Germanic), and one on a plate might be a “coney” (Latinic) but this is not the case. Instead, the most favored word is “rabbit” — which is a Latinic word for a young coney (once they start reproducing in your hutch, they should probably not be thought of as “young”). And, yes, that makes Coney Island the “Isle of Rabbits”.
Some years ago, I lived in the community of Newbury Park, California, adjacent to Thousand Oaks. To travel north to the next city, Camarillo, you had to go over a mountain pass and down a long 800′ 7% slope to near sea-level. Its official name is the “Conejo Grade”….but we would jokingly refer to it as the “bunny hill”.