"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/03/18 (milkshake duck)

We've been talking about animals a lot over the last few days with Liz. And, of course, we used animals for metaphores in English all the time. We pig out on something. We duck to aviod the ball. We're looking foxy, perhaps. Or toadying up, which we've had today, toadying. But bird feature quite a lot as well. I've talked before on Countdown about how pedigree goes back to the pie de grue in French, the foot of crane, because the lines of descent of family trees look a little bit like a crane's foot. One of my favourite ethymologies, that one. But there was one very unexpected one last year, and it seems to be staying the course. I'm not sure you'll be familiar with it, Nick, but it's milkshake duck. It was s result of social media, and it was a tweet by the tweeter Pixelated Boat. And it was, "The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck", this is how it went, "a lovely duck that drinks milkshake". So, really nice, happy image. And then, "Oh, apologies, we regrad to inform you that the duck is racist". And the gist of the joke, essentially, is that people can become incredibly famous very, very quickly on the internet, which we've all witnessed, and wildly popular, but then very often they are exposed for being, could be homofobic, could be racist - for rather unpleasant attributes. And milkshake ducks are exactlt that. They are internet stars, if you like, who quickly fall out of favour because of their offensive actions. 2017 saw very many of those. People who absolutely went viral and then people startred to look into their past. What was happening was people were going through endless years of social media posts etc, trying to find, trying to catch someone out, if you like. So a lot of people saw it as a real sign of schadenfreude. But who knew that a molkshake-drinking duck would join all that words together like pedigree and cranberry, etc? And maybe one day will also go into the English dictionary.