How did a term that started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction? Illustration by Min Heo

Of all the contributions that Lewis Carroll made to the English language—burble, chortle, gimble, galumph—by far the most useful to contemporary culture is “rabbit hole.” Carroll did not, of course, invent the rabbit hole; that distinction belongs to rabbits. But, with the publication of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” he did turn those holes into something that people could fall down—literally, in Alice’s case (or as literally as a fictional fall can be), figuratively for the rest of us. That was in 1865. For most of the ensuing century and a half, the phrase maintained a modest profile, always present but far from omnipresent; you might say it just burbled along. Lately, however, we have begun talking about rabbit holes incessantly. If you set up a Google Alert or open a search window on Twitter, you can watch people plummet into them in real time:

I needed a new knitting project. 70 min later have fallen down the rabbit hole of custom American Girl doll clothes.

nooooo, stop me before i fall down the rabbit hole that is early 90s europop.

down the mom blogging rabbit hole

omg stock photography rabbit hole central

Fell down a Friends rabbit hole.

Heading down the inevitable rabbit hole of pondering buying a new mountain bike.

Wait a minute: buying a new mountain bike? Looking for a new knitting pattern? Binge-watching “Friends”? This, it seems, is why we are hearing “rabbit hole” so often: somewhere along the line, we began using it to mean something new.

In the original tale, as you’ll recall, Alice is lazing in the grass on a warm summer day when she spots a white rabbit hurrying past, wearing a waistcoat and consulting his pocket watch. She jumps up, follows him to his hole, tumbles down it, and winds up in an unfamiliar world of talking caterpillars and narcoleptic dormice and disappearing cats: Wonderland, in all its weirdness. In its most purely Carrollian sense, then, to fall down a rabbit hole means to stumble into a bizarre and disorienting alternate reality.

These days, however, when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction—usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit. Last month, for instance, Grantland ran an entertaining piece called “Going Way Too Deep Down the Rabbit Hole with Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar Mitzvah Appearance.” In it, the writer Rembert Browne tried to determine the identity of each of four pubescent hands making bodily contact with the rapper Minaj in a photo taken at the bar mitzvah of one Matthew Murstein. So what’s going on with that headline? It doesn’t mean “Deep Inside the Alternate-Reality Weirdness of Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar-Mitzvah Appearance.” However infrequently they play bar mitzvahs, rappers, like awkward thirteen-year-olds, are very much a part of our own reality. What it actually means is something more like, “Expending Vast Amounts of Time and Energy on Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar-Mitzvah Appearance in a Way that I Acknowledge Might Seem Unnecessary or Even a Little Insane.” Replace “Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar-Mitzvah Appearance” with “X,” and you have a working definition of the modern rabbit hole.

How did “rabbit hole,” which started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land, evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction? One obvious culprit is the Internet, which has altered to an indescribable degree the ways that we distract ourselves. Twenty years ago, you could browse for hours in a library or museum, spend Saturday night at the movies and Sunday at the mall, kill an afternoon at the local video arcade or an evening at its X-rated analogue—but you couldn’t do those things every day, let alone all day and night. Moreover, content-wise, you couldn’t leapfrog very far or very fast from wherever you started, and there was a limit to the depth and nichiness of what you were likely to find; back then, we had not yet paved the road between, say, Dorothy Hamill and a comprehensive list of Beaux-Arts structures in Manhattan, nor archived for the convenience of humankind ten thousand photographs of fingernail art. Then came the Internet, which operates twenty-four hours a day, boasts a trillion-plus pages, and breeds rabbit holes the way rabbits breed rabbits.

Those online rabbit holes, while wildly variable in content, take recognizable forms. One is iterative: you’re settling down to work when you suddenly remember that you meant to look up that flannel shirt you saw in a store but couldn’t find in your size, and the next thing you know, it’s two hours later and you have scrutinized two hundred and forty-five flannel shirts. Another is exhaustive: you go in search of a particular fact—say, when Shamu debuted at SeaWorld—and soon enough you are well on your way to compiling a definitive account of captive killer whales. A third is associative: you look up one thing, which leads to looking up something distantly related, which leads to looking up something even further afield, which—hey, cool Flickr set of Moroccan sheep. Thus have I have gone from trying to remember the name of a Salinger short story (“Last Day of the Last Furlough”) to looking up the etymology of “furlough” (Dutch) to wondering whether it had any relationship to “furlong” (no) to jogging my memory about the exact distance represented by that unit of measure (an eighth of a mile), to watching approximately every major horse race since the development of the movie camera.

Experiences like these are so common today that, if Carroll had never written “Alice in Wonderland,” we would have needed to invent some other way to describe them. (We might have been aided in that quest by the fact that both nets and webs connote capture and entanglement. Or maybe by analogy to sinkholes we’d have linkholes, or perhaps we’d all get stuck in hypertraps.) But why, one wonders, was “rabbit hole” such a natural appropriation? Granted, Alice, too, accidentally wound up in a convoluted environment, spent more time there than she anticipated, couldn’t find a way out, and emerged, when she finally did, rather dazed. But much the same could be said of Dorothy in Oz, and of a great many others characters transported—by cyclone, wardrobe, mirror, or tollbooth—to mysterious lands.