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One of the few positive media developments in 2008 arrived after the national political conventions, when Rachel Maddow got her own nightly hour on MSNBC.
Not that I always concur with her politics, but unlike most such hosts (i.e., Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity), she doesn't badger, talk over, or needlessly interrupt her guests. She might argue with them, but she always offers them a chance to speak. Nor is she full of herself like Keith Olbermann, who can elevate pomposity to stratospheric levels.
Lately Maddow's show has offered a nightly feature
called Lame Duck Watch,
which observes that George
Walker Bush is still president of the United States of
America, and thus in position to issue regulations, pardons
and executive orders that deserve scrutiny, especially when
most eyes are focused on the impending presidency of Barack
Obama.
This got me to wondering about the origin of the phrase
lame duck.
We use it to describe an office-holder
whose replacement has been elected, but not sworn in. It
connotes a sense of being crippled, even though the lame
duck still holds the full powers of office.
I am no authority on ducks. My grandparents who lived next door when I was a kid kept chickens, not ducks. I went duck-hunting once, but sitting quietly in a blind by the South Platte River on a winter morning was cold and boring.
A farm friend did have a duck pond, where Mama Duck would lead her offspring to shore. The ducklings tried to stay in line while the resident border collie worked to bunch them up. As soon as the collie left, the ducks would string out per their imprinting. Then the collie would return to make the ducklings clump like sheep before wandering off. Mama would get her ducks in a row, and then the affronted collie would return. This went on and on -- if you need to wear out a border collie, get some ducks.
As for wild ducks, it appears that they do not all fly south for the winter. On many frosty days, I see them in the Arkansas River when I'm out walking our dog. These ducks swim and fly. A lame duck might not be able to waddle well, but from what I see, ducks don't do a lot of waddling, and a lame leg might not be that much of a handicap.
So why do we refer to a lame duck
rather than a
sitting duck
or a wingless duck
or a
sinking duck
? Or for that matter, why not a
crippled goose
or a feeble swan
?
The phrase did not originate in politics. According to
my favorite bathroom reference book, Brewer's Dictionary
of Phrase and Fable, the expression originally came
from finance, and referred to a stock-jobber or dealer
who will not, or cannot, pay his losses
and has to
waddle out of the alley like a lame duck.
It also
applies to a defaulter on a loan, and goes back to
18th-century London.
So the stock market not only has bulls and bears, but the original lame ducks. Bernie Madoff of the $50 billion Ponzi scheme ought to qualify, as well as the hordes of Americans who have walked away from their houses when they turned out to be worth less than their mortgages.
In the American political sense, lame duck
was
first used in 1863 in reference to broken-down
politicians,
and the first President to be called a
lame duck was Calvin Coolidge.
Given the original meaning of the phrase, that of
default, and the current political meaning, the waning days
of this Bush administration certainly fit well with lame
duck,
even if the phrase doesn't connect with actual
mallards and mergansers. And we can hope that when the
leading lame duck migrates in January, some of those
stock-jobber lame ducks go, too. But it seems unlikely,
since lame ducks often have a way of hanging around.
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