Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAlister
Word of the Day: Canard
A news commentator recently called a questionable email from a close White House source as “quite possibly a canard.”
Canard is the French word for “duck,” as in the gourmet dish, le canard à l’orange’ but the word is used in English to mean a hoax, false statement or rumor. A canard is also a horizontal stabilizing control surface in front of the wing of an aircraft, said to be named because the stubby profile resembles a duck.
The English use as a hoax is said to arise from the phrase “vendre un canard à moitié,” literally, “half-sell a duck.” The origin of the idiom is lost. Maybe the French had a scam similar to the American bridge-selling schemes successful in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the Brooklyn Bridge was said to have been “sold” on numerous occasions. Among the best known “salesmen” was George C. Parker, one of the great con men in American history. He also “sold” the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and presumably any public building of the period. He wasn’t the only one to sell the bridge on more than one occasion, but he was among the most successful, even employing a fake office and expertly forged documents. The police had to prevent the bridge’s new”‘owners” from setting up toll booths on more than one occasion.
There is no mention that Parker ever sold the Queen Mary, Cunard’s luxury transatlantic ocean liner at the time, but had he done so, it would have been an epic Cunard canard.
