Mark Twain made no point of calling the hare "rabbit" Rabbit

It seems like no one knows the reason why early colonists dropped the word hare.Yet hares are very different from rabbits. Besides biological differences hares will never be pets. Rabbits are pets, bunnies.
The hare is a special animal, creature of wild nature,lore, religion and legend. Why are prescriptivist fighting over a hyphen and not a word against the misnomering of the Hare?

What's in a name

Hare
.E. hara "hare," from W.Gmc. *khasan- (cf. Du. hase, O.H.G. haso), possibly with a sense of "gray" (cf. O.E. hasu "gray"). Cognate with Skt. sasah, Afghan soe, Welsh ceinach "hare." Hare-brained is from 1548, on notion of "flighty, skittish;" hare-lip is from 1567.
"þou hast a crokyd tunge heldyng wyth hownd and wyth hare." ["Jacob's Well," c.1440]

Rabbit
1398, "young of the cony," from Fr. dialect (cf. Walloon robète), dim. of Flem. or M.Du. robbe "rabbit," of unknown origin. The adult was a cony (q.v.) until 18c.
"Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit." [H.L. Mencken]

coney island, (no longer an island, but it once was) got its name from the hares conys that were found on the island.
(there might be some rabbits kept as pets nowdays, but no wild hares or rabbits live there now!)

Well whatever happened to the hares of Coney Island?

Now I wonder Helen, what manner of meat was found in those delicious New York hot dogs that were once called "coneys"? Why didn't they call them "haries"?

Strange.

Nathans (of coney island) has kosher (all beef--and only the front end of cow beef!) hot dogs. (i don't know if hare (or rabbit is kosher or not..)

as for what happened to all the coney's--ask BranShea--they all disappeared while NY was still New Amsterdam! lots of brooklyn (and queens) place names are dutch..(well lots of NY (city and state!) place names are dutch..
all the Kills (freshkills, fishkills, Peekskills, are dutch in origin (as is Flushing and Harlem (in the netherlands its spelled harlaam) Bushwick and van wyck and van dyke, and all the vans are dutch too, and so is flatbush.

and NY brownstones bear an uncanny resemblance to the town houses of amsterdam.. complete with stoops.. (and wife's inside have coffee clatches, with cookies!)

my guess is all those thrifty dutch housewives made a lot of rabbit stew!

Ho,ho,ho Helen, we may have all eaten them , but at least we respected their good names. (Harlem is called Haarlem here)
(what's in a name)I hope all those Kill names onely refer to hares,though I have my doubts. Cause I don't really know who ran faster, the hare or the indian.

No,no!I remember now ; kil/kiel is an old Dutch word for a small stream. We have here Dordtse Kiel, a little stream.

Kill--- No kill
Online ethymology:"stream," 1639, Amer.Eng., from Du. kil, from M.Du. kille "riverbed," especially in place names.

Is there any water to be seen round those place that bear the name Kill? Helen?

Oops-- i remembered the dutch haarlem had 2 a's--just got them in the wrong place (it was late)

and yes, all the kill's are waterways (stream, etc) or located (if town/city's on streems (Fishkill and Peekskill are city's on the hudson river at places were streams join this river)

the Great Kills is a stream in the marsh lands of Staten Island (there is a great kills harbor too)

Dutch kills (a neighborhood in western queens is one of the few that doesn't have a waterway. the kill was "improved" out of existance! --dutch kills is near the Newton creek, and van Dam Avenue in queens..(a largely, but not entirely, industrial wharehouse area.)

we also, now that i think of it, have some dorps.. New Dorp comes to mind (dorp --a small town or settlement.)(also in Staten Island)

(in the movie, 39 Steps, (an alfred hitchcock movie) a character says he comes from "a one shay dorp" (he is a visitor from South Africa)-- a shay is a kind of carriage (a fancy horse drawn carriage), and a dorp, a small town--

how small? today we would say "blink and you miss it" or "only big enough to have 1 traffic signal(or light)", but a town only small enough for there to be only one fancy carriage is pretty small.

is dorp still used in the netherlands?

I should bring a little rowing boat then and row down the kills of New York.
Yes, dorp pl.-dorpen is still the same. Many dorpen have been annexeted by expanding cities, just like it happened in New York.
But there are countless little villages. I give you one in Friesland. Church in the centerpart, some houses and then farms starting from the outsides.
These are parts where hares can be found. Rabbits live in the dunes and sandy woods.

Aldsjerk, Friesland

Hey!Oops! I wonder where all the cows have gone. ( High tech barns?)

(i don't know if hare (or rabbit is kosher or not..)

Rabbits and hares are treyf. So, are pigs, camels, and horses. But locusts are OK. Go figure.

i can't embed a satelite photo of new dorp (staten island) here (google limitation)
but here is a link

the blue outlined road in lower right corner is hyland blvd, the main cross street is New Dorp (rd?lane?)

like most of NYC its pretty developed with very few open bits of land.. (but like most of staten island, small one and two family homes!
the only thing i really know about friesland is, its dialect is the closest to english.. (it's possible to construct some sentences that make sense (and have the same meaning!) in both english and friesian.)

the only thing i really know about friesland is, its dialect is the closest to english.

There are a couple of Frisian languages spread out in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. The same Wikipedia (cum grano salisch) has a sample text from West Frisian (Frysk). I knew a Frisian once, and showed him Beowulf in Old English. He was able to pick up the meaning of the text better than Anglophones. The Frisians are also the butt of many moron-style jokes in Germany. A famous German comic, Otto Waalkes, comes from Friesland, and he sometimes plays to the stereotypes that other Germans have about that area.

.> its dialect is the closest to english.. <.
Our Collegue above is the expert to that.
New Dorp village seems to lie asleep under the parking space. But still, thanks for showing New Dorp.

zmjezhd, of course I'm happy with the details about the Frysk language but I would be also seriously interested in your vieuw on the misnomering issue.
Ever stood eye to eye with a hare accidently? You would never more call him/her rabbit after that.