The phrase like a deer, or like a rabbit, caught in the headlights, and its variants, are used of a person who is frozen with fright or surprise, or is trying to flee, as a result of suddenly becoming the focus of attention.
This phrase alludes to the habit of deer, rabbits, etc., of stopping still when dazzled by the headlights of a motor vehicle, or of running away within the headlight beam.
The earliest occurrences that I have found of the phrase like a deer, or like a rabbit, caught in the headlights and variants are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: With reference to the headlight of a train, the metaphor occurs in the following from the column The Coal Bin, by Henry Vance, published in The Birmingham News (Birmingham, Alabama, USA) of Sunday 27th May 1923:
Our Own Anthology.
EZRA COLE.Have you ever seen a farmer boy
Wandering about a circus ground,
Not knowing which way to turn
Or which one of the many side-shows
He might give up his money to see?
Have you ever seen a jack-rabbit,
Blinded by the headlight of a train,
Remain upon the track until too late
To escape the thundering death?
Thus was I fascinated and confused
By life in the great city of New York,
Until one day, marveling at the accident
That led Sir Isaac Newton to discover
The law of gravitation, I heedlessly
Stepped into an elevator shaft and fell
To mv death, fifteen stories below.
—R. M. M.
2-: From The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas, USA) of Wednesday 15th February 1928:
“Love,” a screen version of Tolstoi’s “Anna Karenina,” 1 offers a story which is highly suitable to the talents, or parlor tricks, of Greta Garbo 2 and John Gilbert 3. The former continues to languish with drooping eyelids through prolonged periods of agony in her now familiar manner and to drape her person gracefully about her military lover.
Gilbert himself offers his usual charms, the delighted grin when first her beauty bursts upon his startled gaze and then the fixed stare with which he afterwards regards her, in a manner much like that of a rabbit observing the headlights of an approaching car.
1 Love (1927) is a U.S. film based on Anna Karenina, by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi – 1828-1910).
2 Greta Garbo (Greta Gustafsson – 1905-1990) was a Swedish-born U.S. actress.
3 John Gilbert (John Cecil Pringle – 1897-1936) was a U.S. actor, screenwriter and director.
3-: From the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio, USA) of Tuesday 20th September 1932:
Whether or not you like the new football rules is going to depend upon how you like your football—straight or fancy.
If you like the thud of flesh on turf and the smack of canvas against canvas, and an appearance of carnage, you’re going to be disappointed.
If you like to see a halfback spinning wide around end, dashing like a rabbit that auto headlights have just picked out through the rain on a moon-forsaken road, it’s your season.
4-: From The Ghost of the Car, a short story by Peter McCrae, published in the Falkirk Herald (Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland) of Wednesday 19th September 1934:
On an impulse Weston switched on his headlights. The shimmering sands jumped into life; in the same second a scream of horror broke across the night.
The doctor did not realise it at the time, but Casson was dashing blindly away from the gleam of light. He ran with the awkward, hesitating speed of a rabbit suddenly overtaken by the headlights of a car on a lonely road—a thing of dread and horrid fear.
5-: From The Third Man, by the British novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991)—as published in The Sunday Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Sunday 26th March 1950:
Martins stood dithering there above Bates’s body, with Harry Lime halfway between us. We couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting Martins, and the light of the searchlight dazzled Lime. We moved slowly on, our revolvers trained for a chance, and Lime turned this way and that way like a rabbit dazzled by headlights: then suddenly he took a flying jump into the deep central rushing stream.
6-: From the account of a court case, published in The Barre Daily Times (Barre, Vermont, USA) of Tuesday 22nd July 1952:
Jacked like a deer in dazzling headlights, Connecticut’s gift to Vermont industry was easy prey for the rebel with legal turn of mind.
7-: From The Feared and The Fearless (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953), by the New-Zealand novelist Guthrie Wilson (1914-1984):
Once he stumbled, then pulled himself upright and ran on, keeping to the track as a rabbit caught in the headlights’ glare will do.
8-: From Fashion’s frolics: A cry from the heart of an ordinary woman, by M. G. Taylor, published in the Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian (Halifax, Yorkshire, England) of Monday 15th February 1954:
How odd its seems that the top fashion designers should be men. I wonder, do they never have a qualm of conscience as they sit waiting for a flash of inspiration, which will turn our present wardrobes upside down?
[…]
Alas! we are helpless as young rabbits caught in fashion’s headlights. The big ten decree this and that New Look. Ordinary Mrs. Britain, who must at least count her shillings, sets her jaw. “I like what I’m wearing. I’ll stick to it,” she determines.
But as the weeks fly past an insidious brain-washing affects the unsuspecting British matron. The glossy women’s magazines, the plate-glass windows of the fashion houses reflect the New Look at its most glamorous. Women with no budget worries, to whom fashion is the breath of life gleefully dispose of another wad of banknotes. Gradually, in the streets and in the cafés, a metamorphosis takes place in the shape of womankind. The New Look is in!
9-: From a letter to the Editor, by ‘Es Ay’, about European reactions to McCarthyism 4, published in The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA) of Thursday 15th April 1954:
Newspapers expressed alarm in the last few days about the way things are going in the United States where many leading Americans are just sitting still like rabbits in the headlights.
4 McCarthyism was a vociferous campaign against alleged Communists in the U.S. government and other institutions, which was carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy (1909-1957) from 1950 to 1954.
10-: From Censure from Europe: How McCarthy Hurt the U.S. Cause, published in Time (New York City, New York, USA) of Monday 4th October 1954:
As the Watkins committee put the finishing touches on the report that may finish Senator McCarthy as a major force in U.S. politics, TIME and LIFE Correspondent Emmet John Hughes cabled from London an estimate of the harm McCarthy had done to U.S. policy in Europe. Wrote Hughes:
[…]
All U.S. leadership tends to be confused with and contaminated by the conduct of Senator McCarthy. A large part of this identification can be credited to the fact that European democrats, inevitably thinking in terms of parliamentary government, have only the dimmest understanding of the U.S. separation of executive and legislative powers. Their lack of instruction is scarcely the fault of Senator McCarthy—or President Eisenhower—but the effect is not mitigated by this. The effect is that the President and the anti-McCarthy Republicans quite often seem to horrified European onlookers like rabbits transfixed by the headlights of an onrushing truck.
11-: From the column Making Them Dance!, by Jim Dance, published in The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida, USA) of Wednesday 17th November 1954:
The greyhounds […] are natural born runners to start with. I had one as a pet, and he spent most of his day circling the house at full speed—a sort of canine Walter Mitty, thinking all the while he was a Beachcomber in the Derby.
This also put a premium on timing when trying to get out the door, and I often felt like a rabbit in somebody’s headlights as the beast came bearing down on me, slavering wildly in his imaginary drive to the wire.
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