Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 1/Newspaper "canards"
NEWSPAPER “CANARDS.”
M. Quételet, in the Annuaire de l'Académie (article Cornelissen), relates in the following terms the manner in which the word “canard” became used in its new sense. To give a sly hit at the ridiculous pieces of intelligence which the journals were in the habit of publishing every morning, Cornelissen stated that an interesting experiment had just been made, calculated to prove the extraordinary voracity of ducks. Twenty of these animals had been placed together; and one of them having been killed and cut up in the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all, and thrown to the other nineteen, was most gluttonously gobbled up in an exceedingly brief space of time. Another was then taken from the nineteen, and being chopped small like its predecessor, was served up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other; and so on to the last, who was thus placed
in the position of having eaten his nineteen companions in a wonderfully short time. All this, most pleasantly related, obtained a success which the writer was far from anticipating, for the story ran the round of all the journals of Europe. It then became forgotten for about a score of years, when it came back from America with amplifications which it did not boast of at the commencement, and with a regular certificate of the autopsy of the body of the surviving animal, whose œsophagus was declared to have been seriously injured. Every one laughed at the history of the “Canard” thus brought up again, but the word remained in its novel signification.