The Origins of Canard November 7, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Busy day here so Beach will just offer this short piece about the origin of the word ‘canard’. If true this is really a late eighteenth-century urban legend; if false it is a canard about a canard. First the basics, canard, the French for duck, came to mean any false story in nineteenth-century English. But where did the word come from?
After the Reign of Terror in France, the people turned, by what was perhaps a natural reaction, to jokes and cumbrous tricks upon each other, many of which partook of the coarseness of the epoch just passed. The newspapers vied with each other starting false and grotesque reports. One of these, in a Parisian journal, was to the effect that, to test the voracity of ducks, a naturalist in Paris had shut 20 of these birds in a cage and killed one every quarter on hour, feeding the flesh to its comrades. At the end of five hours but one duck remained. It had devoured all of its 19 companions. This impossible tale gained a sudden and wide credence which astonished even its inventor. It was translated into English and the Continental languages, and copied from journal to journal until it reached India and America. So general was its acceptance that subsequent hoaxes have been given the name of canard, duck.
There are two possibilities here. First, that the journalist is correct and that the word canard with the sense of tall tale originated because of this delightfully crude story. Second, that this explanation is, itself, an invention or, as our Victorian ancestors would have put it, a canard. Beach is unsure which he would prefer but probably the second. Can anyone throw any light on this issue: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com For example, is canard used with the sense of tall tale in France prior to the late 1700s?
The sources is: Kent and Sussex Courier, 29 Mar 1893, 4
17 Nov 2018: Edgar sorts this one out, ‘Searching on the French version of Google, one quickly finds
1) According to the 1863 Dictionary of The French Language, canard as absurd tale is mentioned in
2) The 1715 “la Comédie des proverbes” on p 81 and in
3) The 1612 “Recueil des plus excellents ballets” p 19 (not found online),
both of which predate the events during the Reign of Terror as asserted in the Kent and Sussex Courier, 29 Mar 1893
4) One may find a 1918 version of the assertion along with a quote of 3) here with the Paris naturalist changed to a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. Much more authoritative!
See also
‘The word “Canard,” in that peculiar sense, is traced by Oudin, on the older authority of Cotgrave, to the old expressions, vendre ou donner un canard à moitié, meaning to cheat, to deceive, to make believe’ See 1896
For “The duck that ate five of its brothers”, Cotgrave, Oudin, etc. see 1789 Variétés historiques et littéraires, Tome VII at https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Canard_qui_mange_cinq_de_ses_frères_et_qui_est_mangé_à_son_tour_par_un_colonel
and that just predates the French Revolution, and thus The Terror.
Filip writes, 27 Nov 2016: Here’s some interesting information on “canard“: filling in some blanks.
