Recently I had occasion to seek the origin and
meaning of the phrase (in full) “like a
dying duck in a thunderstorm”.
If you google that phrase, you’ll find plenty -- mostly pages and pages
of ill-informed and inconclusive forum-discussion; even if an authoritative answer lies buried there somewhere,
it is not worth one’s while to sift through the debris.
So here is the entry from a standard
reference-work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by
Eric Partridge (first edition 1937; many subsequent updates), in its entirety:
To
have a ludicrously forlorn, hopeless, and helpless appearance : coll., orig. rural: from ca. 1850 (Ware).
Now, as it happens, we can antedate that
date; and this, in a
lexicographically most interesting way:
not with a simple antecedent Erstbeleg,
but something more powerful though more roundabout.
~
Back when I was an editor at Merriam-Webster
dictionaries, I had full responsibility for the two technical disciplines of
Etymology and of Pronunciation, but none at all for the company’s meat and
drink, which was defining; let alone for deciding which new words
were to be entered in the flagship Collegiate ™ dictionary, which was
lightly revised each year, and wholly reedited each decade. That privilege fell to the Editor-in-Chief,
Dr. Mish -- an intelligent and well-educated man, and not without a certain wry
humor; but as regards the humors, he rather took after his
atrabilious and phlegmatic predecessor, Doctor Johnson, whose sour frowning
portrait hung over his desk, exactly matching the successor’s habitual
mood. I used to despair at the chef-rédacteur’s obstinate sluggishness
against admitting culturally key new words -- they’d make it in eventually, but
only after the kairos had long passed -- and occasionally would champion some
one particular word for inclusion, loading the files with attestations for the
definer to refer to next time around.
One such, at the height of Gorbachev, was glasnost. Many were the citations I supplied, to no avail. However (one might argue) you can
always pile up stats for some particular term, no matter how specialized, by
drawing from specialized sources:
which would prove nothing.
The Collegiate is not for the specialist, but for the general
educated public; and glasnost is, after all, in origin Russian: the Collegiate is quite rightly chary of letting in
too many foreign terms (like Erstbeleg
-- common in the lexicographic literature, but unknown outside it). So, how to show that the word had
passed into English common currency?
In support of the suggestion that glasnost be included, I submitted slips
attesting such derivata as glasnostic,
with fully English morphology (and phonology: the stress shifts to another vowel, which additionally is
detensed). Now, that was a nonce
form, unworthy of inclusion on its own;
but it did witness the fact that, by then, glasnost had already passed into the everyday Wortschatz of American English, for a confection like “glasnostic” presupposes the antecedent currency of
the base.
~
And so, back to our duck.
Consider the following passage from Dickens’ novel
Martin Chuzzlewit:
‘What,’
he asked of Mr Pecksniff, happening to catch his eye in its descent; for until now it had been piously upraised, with something of that
expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an
electric storm …
Now,
this circumlocuitous, scarcely lapidary, obscure expression, is (as the
annotator notes, in the Penguin edition) nothing more nor less than a winking
allusion to the set expression (alliterative, assonant, and striking in its
imagery) a dying duck in a thunderstorm. Moreover, the allusion could not
possibly work unless that expression were antecedently quite familiar to the
reader, since -- much more than the morphological presupposition of glasnost by glasnostic-- there is a significant gap (lexical, though not
semantic) between the original and the pastiche. The case is often to be met with in literature -- more
usually in a droll setting, as here, though we do find “like the cat in the adage” in MacBeth,
an allusion (one requiring rather
a lot of the groundlings, one should have thought) to the Latin catus amat piscis, sed non vult tingere
plantas (a cat likes fish, but doesn’t like to get its paws wet).
The key point here is that the first half of Martin
Chuzzlewit (where our passage
appears) was initially serialized
in 1843, thus antedating
the Ware/Partridge date. And if
the proverb had occurred literatim,
it would antedate matters no further.
But as it stands, we can deduce that the adage was already in wide
circulation among Dickens’ anticipated readership, well before 1843: else he could not have counted on them
to get the reference: and without
that, the passage falls flat.
[Psychostylistic footnote] It is the very paradoxical absurdity of the original adage,
that tempts Dickens to toy with it.
For after all, ducks do just fine in thunderstorms, much better than do
squirrels (or the proverbial “drowned rat”) -- rain being, as the expression
has it, “nice weather for ducks”.
In just such a fashion does Wodehouse (through his character Bertie
Wooster) play, in novel after novel, with the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
that ends “like quills upon the fretful porpentine”. Or, at a humbler level, such dimestore wit as hasta la pasta (for hasta la vista).
(For our own discourse upon said porpentine, click here.)
For final proof, if proof be needed, this witness from
Washington Irving’s fine finger-exercise of a story of 1824, “The Stout Gentleman”:
Rain pattered against the
casements. … There were several
half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable
cristfallen cock … Everything was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of
hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a
riotous noise over their liquor.
-- Washington Irving, from Tales
of a Traveller
.
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