Duck by Victoria de Rijke

Author:Victoria de Rijke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

During the period of her keeping company with Mr Sanders, [she] had received love letters, like other ladies. In the course of their correspondence Mr Sanders had often called her a ‘duck’, but never ‘chops’, nor yet ‘tomato sauce’. He was particularly fond of ducks. Perhaps if he had been as fond of chops and tomato sauce, he might have called her that, as a term of affection.10

Dickens exposes how terms of endearment can turn sinister, as in The Old Curiosity Shop, where the dwarf Quilp refers to the lovely child Nell as ‘dainty duck’ and ‘my duck of diamonds’, a duck ornament he covets and keeps while she weeps for her dying father.11 In modern UK English a duck can be a fine example of something: ‘Oh, isn’t he the duck of a fellow?’ A duck of diamonds is the best, as is the duck’s quack. Duck Soup – besides being the title of well-known comedies by Laurel and Hardy in 1927 and the Marx Brothers in 1933 – is anything easy, a guaranteed success. ‘I went a-ducking with my duck’ is to go courting with a sweetheart. Though Henry VIII’S letter to Anne Boleyn uses duckys to mean her breasts – ‘whose pritty duckys I trust shortly to kysse’12 – ducky, slang from 1897, expressed general fondness, especially as still used in the East Midlands of England: ‘Isn’t that ducky?’ ‘How are you, duckie?’ ‘Alright, me duck?’ By the early twentieth century, in Australian English, it had become male and sarcastic – ‘Isn’t that a ducky pair of shorts?’ – and a similar usage is found in present-day gay communities, often for exaggerated, camp irony. This may carry crudely homophobic overtones: ‘Watch your ass: there’s duck dudes round here’, and duck became US slang for ‘gay’.13 In Mandarin Chinese a duck or yazi is a male prostitute. Yet, as noted in the categories above, many duck metaphors are associated with the seemingly manlier pursuits of competitive sports and military action. What begins to be apparent is how untrustworthy duck idiom is, how it itself ducks fixed categories of meaning.

US slang has a duckbutt as a runt; a duck’s ass (or DA) a 1950s haircut; a duck-fucker a loafer or lout (named after the man who looked after the poultry on a warship); a duck fit is a tantrum; a duck fart the plop of a stone falling into water; the exclamation ‘Fuck a duck!’14 expresses astonishment; the duckpond is the vagina; duck butter is smegma, semen or sweat around the male genitals; to stick the duck in the mud is a (male) plan to have sex.

Some duck metaphors remain elusive. If duck green is the bright green of duckweed, duck-egg blue, the palest, purest light greenish-blue thought by some to be the colour of infinity, perhaps refers back to those myths of a world created from a cosmic duck’s egg. In Caribbean Hinglish duck-pickneys are ducklings: the expression ‘Hen ’gree fe hatch duck egg, but him no ‘gree

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