Why do we accuse someone who talks on and on, giving us more details than we ever wanted, of ‘rabbiting on’. The expression was first recorded in 1950, in a book called The Lag’s Lexicon, compiled and written by Paul Tempest as a record of prison slang. To those doing ‘porridge’ behind bars ‘rabbit on’ meant, ‘one who never stops talking’. And if you were stuck sharing a cell with a such a person I can well understand how it would really get on your wick after a while.

The official definition by the Oxford wise ones says that to ‘rabbit on’ means, ‘To talk volubly to chatter; to speak or write at length, without saying anything important’. Although some other dictionaries (including the Cambridge and the Collins) add that ‘rabbiting on’ means talking not only at length, but also on a subject of no interest to the person you’re speaking to. Doubly annoying! (Something you and I would never do, right? Right!) Mind you, there are some distinguished people who have been accused of ‘rabbiting on’. When Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel The Name of the Rose was first published, the reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald said, ‘Umberto Eco spent the first 100 closely typed pages of The Name of the Rose rabbiting on about Benedictine history, before getting to the murder that kick-started the plot.’ Well, I read the novel when it first came out, and I was gripped from page one (and it became a major movie starring Sean Connery – so I was not alone). Perhaps ‘rabbiting on’ is in the eye of the beholder? And why this word for constant talking? None of the experts makes any suggestions, so here is mine: the person ‘rabbiting on’ breeds words as prolifically and rapidly as rabbits breed rabbits. At least my idea seems plausible, doesn’t it?

The expression ‘conspiracy theory’ is much older than you might expect. ‘Conspiracy theories’ were around long before Mel Gibson’s 1997 movie of that name, and long before late night talkback shows were filled with weird conspiracy theories. This compound noun first appeared in print in the New York Times in 1863. And even in that first appearance the notion of powerful, behind-the-scenes conspiracies was debunked. Addressing those people who insist that everything happening in the world is planned in smoke-filled back rooms by a handful of powerful people, the NYT journalist makes the point that ‘conspiracy theorists don’t understand the complications which render such a conspiracy impossible’. The same point was made with powerful logical rigour by Sir Karl Popper in 1952 in The Open Society and its Enemies. And this matters because there is one mad conspiracy theory that is widely believed in Australia today – namely, the belief that there is a powerful Israeli (or Jewish or Zionist) lobby that secretly controls the way the media reports (or mis-reports according to them) antisemitism in Australia. Cathy Wilcox drew a notorious cartoon asserting that grass-roots complaints about antisemitism were all orchestrated by this secret, all-powerful conspiracy. People as distinguished (and intelligent) as Bob Carr have written on social media about an all-powerful ‘Israel lobby’.

This conspiracy theory can be traced back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – an antisemitic hoax and forgery purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination, published in Russia in 1903. It was a pack of lies when that thoroughly nasty book was published, and it is still a pack of lies to this day. Sadly, the so-called ‘pro-Palestinian’ activists are busy pushing this conspiracy theory and are persuading intelligent people to believe them. But we know better than to believe any conspiracy theory. We know that all these mad ideas (including the ‘Israel lobby’ conspiracy theory) are the fictional nonsense that Karl Popper exposed them as being all those years ago. Sadly, this ‘Zionist lobby’ theory has spread beyond the cuckoo world of late-night talkback radio to people who should know better.