Quel canard! Quelle oie!

Referencing the mandrakes that have been showing up in the syn stream recently, Poppop left this comment on my last post.

Glad you saw the etymonline mandrakery -- I saw it too last week and almost dropped you a line. I had probably gone 30 years without encountering the word and then boom it was there online twice.

 

Perhaps in an alternate universe, there is an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Man-Drake, who fights crime since witnessing his parents' murder at the hands of mean hunters? Quel canard.

I read this comment on the afternoon of November 13 (Taiwan time). On the morning of the same day, approximately six hours before reading the comment, I had been cleaning out some cabinets in my study when I found a folder containing some very old papers, going all the way back to my toddler days. A lot of them, I have no idea why I kept them, but now that I have kept them all these years, just throwing them away would be unthinkable. Among the papers filed there were four pages of cartoons drawn by my brother Luther on the backs of documents dated 1991 and 1992, when he would have been 10 or 11.

Welcome to your alternate universe, Poppop.

Now I happen to remember that this is not actually an anthropomorphic duck but rather an anthropomorphic goose named Gilbert, and that his hunter nemesis is called Milton. There's no real backstory beyond that -- nothing but this handful of drawings -- but he's obviously an anthropomorphic waterfowl with a grudge against hunters, and he certainly seems to have super powers. I mean, in the first strip he is apparently strong enough to break a rifle barrel with his bare hands and fast enough to do so, pound the broken piece into the ground, and tie Milton's shoelaces to it all before the latter has time to react. Then he apparently takes the gun, repairs the broken barrel with some super-strong material, and later deflects bullets by holding his gun in just the right position so they hit the reinforced barrel and bounce off! That's some next level kung fu there.

Poppop ended his comment with Quel canard, "What a duck!" Later that day, some random link-following led me to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's take on Dave Chappelle's recent monologue. It's no surprise that the word canard was used a few times -- antisemitic and canard go together like kippers and marmalade -- but one instance nevertheless stood out.

That joked [sic] echoed a familiar line of Jewish defense groups, who are often at pains to point out that a disproportionate Jewish presence in an industry is not an indication of a conspiracy -- an age-old canard.

Taken literally, isn't that saying that the idea that disproportionate Jewish presence is not an indication of conspiracy is a canard?

One more coincidence to note: Before suggesting that "Man-Drake" might be an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Poppop said that the last time he had encountered the word mandrake was probably 30 years ago. Thirty years ago would be 1992 -- which, judging by the dates on the backs of the pages, is probably the very year that my brother's athropomorphic goose superhero comics were drawn.