A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path by Gregory Forth

Author:Gregory Forth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

DUCK

319. Duck scooping up everything

Bébe tolo sogho

A voracious, undiscriminating eater who consumes all available food

One of several metaphors used to describe or mildly rebuke people who are considered greedy, the relevant image is a duck shovelling up food with its bill.

320. Walk like a duck

La’a bhia ko’o bébe

A person with a waddling gait

Bébe (duck) can be reduplicated in this expression as bébe bébe. The phrase may be applied more often to women than to men and was said usually to refer to someone who walks slowly and laboriously owing to infirmity caused by injury, illness, or advanced age, or simply because a person has very short legs. The source of the metaphor is domestic rather than wild ducks (bébe ae, “freshwater” or “river ducks”); as commentators remarked, wild ducks can move quickly, both bipedally and in flight. As keeping ducks is a practice introduced in the twentieth century, the expression is evidently of recent coinage. Nevertheless, it is a point of interest that both English-speakers and Nage compare waddling in humans to the method of bipedal motion characteristic of Anseriformes – an apparently ineluctable similarity.

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