When the power of decision-makers is waning, they have recently been called the "lame duck".
What is not meant in the way you intuitively understand as a German: The meaning of our "lame duck" is shifting significantly because we have crossed it with the "lame duck" from English.
Just a few years ago, "lame duck" immediately made you think of something slow - the runner who was the last to cross the finish line;
the somewhat dumb contemporary who always understands something too late;
the vehicle that just keeps rolling behind.
And now?
Think of business captains or football coaches with an expiring contract and, above all, of politicians whose influence is crumbling because they are "counted" or on the way to giving up their office.
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Duck, unsuspecting: My dear swan, this animal always has to serve
Photo: George Clerk / Getty Images
It is normal for expressions to change their meaning over time.
The duck is almost a prime example, as its name is constantly loaded with other meanings: Very few ducks we talk about are cackling water birds with a short neck, a conspicuous gait and very wide feet.
The two meanings of the term "lame duck" that are common today can be traced back to their origins fairly easily.
The first lame duck growled
For decades, the first people in Germany thought of a car.
One thing that its fans dearly love to this day: In 1949 the French manufacturer Citroën brought the "2CV" onto the market, which reached speeds of up to 60 km / h with almost 9 hp - but only downhill.
Even the later, 29 hp models struggled with rigors such as inclines, passengers, headwinds or - in the unsuccessful attempt to overtake - the wind and bow wave of trucks.
And as the proverbial "lame duck" with his despisers.
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Ente: The cult car, only known as 2CV (pronounced "dö-schi-wo") in France, is an icon of automotive history.
It is original - with folding windows, roll-up roof and turret mechanism, two-cylinder engine and seating that gives you the feeling of camping as soon as you arrive.
Photo: Oliver Berg / dpa
However, ducks with deficits knew the German language long in advance.
The »lead duck« has probably been established since the beginning of the 19th century - as a name for a miserable swimmer who is characterized, so to speak, by a radically vertically oriented swimming technique.
And Martin Luther already knew that "blue ducks" lie.
That is why he liked to call followers of alleged heresies "peeping" (instead of "flying ducks", which he certainly liked to land on his plate).
In the French language "ducks to give" is supposed to mean that someone was serving lies.
In French and English, the false report in the press is still called "Canard" (duck), which may have come back into German in a roundabout way - although there are other, sometimes very original, theories about the origin of the "newspaper duck".
The lame duck fetches the predator
The "lame duck" in its more recent meaning is also a term with a migration background: It immigrated from English.
And the "lame duck" is even considerably older than our lame duck.
The first written mention goes back to Horace Walpole.
In 1761 the fourth Earl of Oxford asked his friend Horace Mann if he knew what "a bull, a bear and a lame duck" were.
These words were part of the slang on the London Stock Exchange at the time and apparently amused Walpole very much.
"Lame duck" originally stood for an unhappy investor who could no longer meet his financial obligations.
Such a bankrupt then had no choice but to leave the stock market as a broken person - waddling, so to speak, waddling, a favorite food for predators and vultures.
This meaning soon made it into common usage, as an exchange of letters from 1791 shows: When the Countess of Devonshire gambled away the astronomical sum of 50,000 pounds on the stock exchange, the writer Mary Berry gleefully blasphemed, the whole town gossiped about the Name of the countess "as a lame duck" should be displayed.
Should read: The Countess was insolvent.
The time after the US elections
To this day, the lame duck sticks to the lack of influence resulting from bankruptcy.
In the USA, the term was discovered and adapted for politics: Since then, it has meant a ruler who actually no longer has any power.
A US president becomes a “lame duck” if he has missed his re-election or is at the end of his last term of office.
And because the elections always take place in November, but the transfer of power only on January 20th, the so-called
lame duck period
is inevitable
.
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During this time, a president still has all the formal powers.
However, it is considered improper to take full advantage of them: the successor can collect all decisions again.
This lame duck time in the USA lasted a full four months until 1933.
An excruciatingly long period of political paralysis was found, and it was shortened to the duration customary today - with the 20th Amendment, popularly known as the "Lame Duck Constitutional Addition".
In this sense, the "lame duck" made it into the German language from the end of the 1980s.
The dubious honor of being the first politician to wear this label was probably bestowed on the FDP politician Otto Graf Lambsdorff.
Despite conviction for his role in the Flick party donation affair, he became party chairman in 1988.
Two years later, his rival Jürgen Möllemann told the press that Lambsdorff would leave it at one term and that he himself would take over the FDP federal chairmanship in 1993, or at least strive to do so.
From then on, Lambsdorff was considered to be discontinued.
Since then, politicians beyond their zenith have been regularly named lame duck in Germany - including Angela Merkel, of course, since she announced the end of her term of office in 2018.
This becomes a loud accusation when a weakness in enforcement reveals the dying influence: since Germany has been staggering through the pandemic, this can be clearly observed.