July 27, 2001

canard

Please tell me the origin of the expression "canard" as in "It's a canard." Someone told me that canard means duck in French. True?

Yes, canard does mean 'duck' in French. The question here is whether the French word is related to the English word you're curious about, canard meaning 'a false or baseless, usu. derogatory story, report, or rumor'. The answer is yes.

While the connection between ducks and false stories would seem to be an unusual one, the explanation is simply that a part of a French idiom has made it into English, and the idiom doesn't translate well. Just as "kick the bucket" meaning 'to die' wouldn't make sense if it were literally translated into another language, the French idiom doesn't make sense in English.

Canard means 'a false story; hoax' in French, which is where the English sense directly comes from. But the full phrase, in use since Middle French, is vendre un canard a moitie (with accents omitted), which means 'to cheat or swindle', and literally means 'to half-sell a duck', since to half-sell a duck is the same as not selling it at all. And something--the duck--used for swindling can be considered a false or deceptive thing, which is how it all gets tied together. In English we only preserve the 'duck' word, without the rest of the idiom--which, as said, wouldn't make sense in English anyway.

This sense of canard is first found in English in the middle of the nineteenth century. The French word is based on a word meaning 'to quack; cackle', which is of imitative origin.