duck

Because I am actually that big of a nerd when it comes to all things verbal, a game I sometimes play (with myself because I am also lonely) is wondering whether two homophones are related. For example, English has prune, which can be a verb meaning “to trim a tree” but also the fruit that one such tree might grow. They’re not related, however: the latter goes back to a very old word for “plum,” while the former comes from the French proignier, “to cut back,” which in turn comes from origins unknown (though perhaps both preen and the Latin verb retundiare, “to round off,” figure into it).

See? Barrels of fun!

I was very surprised to look up duck and find that its two senses — the bird that says “quack” but also the action of lowering your body — are probably related. In Old English, the duck was known as the ened until it was replaced by duce, “a duck,” but also “a ducker,” presumably from ducan, meaning “to duck, dive” because the birds have that habit of plunging deep into water. According to Etymonline, the sense of “to lower or bend down suddenly” has been in use in English since the 1520s. 

The fun does not end there, however. As is so often the case, looking up one thing leads to another, and I ended up on the entry for canard, which is the French word for “duck” but which in English means “a false or unfounded story.” Apparently the latter sense of this word exists in French as well, as a result of the expression vendre un canard à moitié, “to half-sell a duck,” a reference to something that no one remembers anymore. (No, really: Merriam-Webster supports this. It’s apparently a situation where we still have the punchline but we lost the joke.) Etymonline conjectures that quanart, the old French word that canard comes from, may have come into use as a result of humans imitating the the noise a duck makes — “echoic” in the way other words are, like woof, chickadee, zip, cricket, gurgle and even barbarian. But that connection between canard and falseness is super interesting because English’s quack also has that, where a quack can be a “a medical charlatan, impudent and fraudulent pretender to medical skill.” In this case, it’s just a coincidental parallel thing. The “bad doctor” sense of quack comes from an obsolete Dutch word quacksalver,” “hawker of salve,” with the first part coming from the Middle Dutch quacken, “to brag, boast.”