CANARD

[Dr. Goodword]

• canard •

Pronunciation: kê-nahrd • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun.

Meaning: 1. A red herring, an urban myth, a false or misleading story or explanation of something. 2. A small pair of stabilizers located in front of the main wings of an airplane.
Notes: Today's Good Word is a lexical orphan with no derivational relatives. The Oxford English Dictionary reports two brave attempts at using it as a verb. One refers to stories "canarding about in the halls of the hotels" while the other refers to the quacking sound of ducks (see Word History): "A ragged starveling, canarding on a clarionet." We don't recommend this word as a verb.

In Play: Any false representation may be taken as a canard: "I just heard Art d'Echo repeating the old canard that the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí is the eponym of the English adjective gaudy." In fact, life is a sea filled with canards like this one: "I can't believe Alec Sander still believes that old canard that the Eskimo language has 200 words for 'snow'."

Word History: Today's Good Word is yet another one taken directly from French without so much as a letter changed. Canard in French means "a duck" and today's meaning probably derived from an old French adage, vendre un canard à moitié "to half-sell a duck", i.e. to swindle someone. The late Latin noun canardus referred to a kind of boat, so the meaning may have slipped from there to a 'sailing' bird but no one knows for sure. On the other hand, the Old French verb for "to quack" was caner (today cancaner), so the noun may have come from the verb. This verb is imitative of the sound ducks make to the French ear. A canard, then, in Old French would have been a quacker. (Today's ducky little Good Word was suggested by Dr. Margie Sved—and that's no canard!)

[Stargzer]

The sound that a duck makes in French is coin-coin.

Coin normally means corner as in a street corner or a square, but it's not pronounced as it would be in English (koyn). The coi is pronounced kwa and the n is nasalized. It sounds a bit like Burgess Meredith's rendition of The Penguin in the old Batman TV series from the 1960s.

[gailr]

Meaning: 2. A small pair of stabilizers located in front of the main wings of an airplane.

Come the end of July in Wiscahnsin, canards are as common at the EAA as ducks in the parks.