Duck : nm Un duck is a broad web-footed bird with long, pointed wings.
Make a duck: dip one piece de sucre coffee or in a alcoholic drink (calvados ou liqueur). See the expression below.
Walk like a duck (waddle).
Walk like a duck, the tips of the feet apart.
Wet, soaked like a duck: very wet.
Slipping like water over a duck's feathers (see expression below).
It does not break three legs in a duck: it is said of something average or passable.
A duck cold: a great cold. It's freezing cold.
A duck: False news spread by bad newspapers.
Newspaper: colloquial name used to designate daily newspapers, and sometimes other periodicals.
Formerly, a nasty little newspaper, printed without value.
False news, false news; lying story inserted in a newspaper.
Water drinker, restaurant customer who drinks only water.
Lame duck: person ill-suited to the environment in which they find themselves; commercial or industrial company in difficulty.
Headless Duck: political party that no longer has a leader.
Romantic and sentimental man, in love: He spends all his time with his chick, that one. He's a real duck!
Make a duck: in music, play a wrong note, dissoner.
Being the Ugly Duckling: In reference to Danish novelist and storyteller Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1872), standing out negatively, troublesome person in a group.
To play the duck: said of an individual servile or adopting, in a general way or during a particular situation, an attitude withdrawn or even totally submissive.
Doing the duck "can thus be used in the same way as" keeping a low profile "or" not making a wave ".
By extension, said of a person with outrageous attention to the fairer sex.
The expression "We must not take the children of the good Lord for wild ducks": We must not take people for fools.
We must not make fun of people.
The children of the good Lord, they are certainly not angels, since they are men. That is, you, me, etc. In the expression, the children of the good Lord, it is the men worthy of the name, therefore intelligent, honest and respectful of their neighbor, who are opposed to these poor ducks, birds supposed to be foolish fools.
Its exact origin being unknown, the choice of the wild duck instead of the piaf, the puffin or the black-browed albatross remains unexplained.
But if its history is not known, this expression has all the same been used by relatively famous people like Antoine Blondin, Michel Audiard or General de Gaulle. During election periods, this expression is brutally forgotten by our politicians of all stripes who keep taking us for fools.
The expression "Take / suck a duck": Take / suck a piece of sugar soaked in a drink.
It was by comparison with the essentially aquatic life of the palmiped that, in the 1727th century, cited by Furetière in XNUMX, the expression wet like a duck, perfectly equivalent to soaked like a soup.
If we add to this image the frequent movement of the bird's beak plunging rapidly into the water, we quickly end up with the name of duck for this piece of sugar briefly soaked in a liquid, so that it soaks up but does not melt in it. In his Green language dictionary published in 1866, Alfred Delvau gives the following definition: "Piece of sugar soaked in coffee, which the bourgeois gives to his wife or child - if they have been well behaved." "
Since then, even women who are not very wise, and God knows there are many of them, may have the right to their duck, and much more often soaked in the glass of strong alcohol of a neighbor at the table than in coffee.
The expression "Not to break a duck's three legs": To have nothing extraordinary, remarkable.
How could you break the three legs of a nice bird who still has only two except, perhaps, if he was born near Fukushima? And this is precisely where the irony of the expression emerges: if you manage to break three legs of a duck, you are committing an undoubtedly extraordinary act, so it seems impossible (on the condition of closing your eyes to the side barbarian of the thing). Otherwise, what you are doing is extremely mundane.
The expression "Slide like water on the feathers of a duck": it had no psychological effect.
Example: I didn't love him anymore. So his lies slipped over me like water off a duck's feathers.