To say “Thanks ever so much ducks” where did this endearment come from?

Thanks in advance for any info you may have!

elle

It dates to Elizabethan times. The first citation in the OED is from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have no clue why a duck.

(Why a no chicken. [rimshot])

Dave Wilton - 03 December 2010 04:15 PM

(Why a no chicken. [rimshot])

I saw Cocoanuts for the first time a few weeks ago. I’d never seen the routine in context before.  Priceless!

Diegogarcity. I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago as well. (Although I had seen clips of the “Why a duck?” routine before.)

LOL. Where else but on YouTube.

I just learned that the coco in coconuts comes from a Spanish word meaning smiling face.

OP Tipping - 04 December 2010 07:39 AM

I just learned that the coco in coconuts comes from a Spanish word meaning smiling face.

Actually, it’s more likely from Portuguese, which is the source for the Spanish (coco), French (coco), and Italian (cocco).  In both Portuguese and Spanish, the sense is more of “hobgoblin” or “ogre” or “bogeyman”—i.e., something giving fright to children—than simply “smiling face”.  The name of the fruit is believed to have been “coined” by members of Vasco da Gama’s expedition to India, when they came upon coconuts in Mozambique in 1498.

In Chile, where I spent much of my childhood, the word for “bogeyman” was cuco, not coco

So that’s where Coco the Clown got his name!