13 February 2015

canard

[kuh-nahrd; French ka-nar]

noun, plural canards [kuh-nahrdz; French ka-nar]
1. a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor.
2. Cookery. a duck intended or used for food.
3. Aeronautics.
an airplane that has its horizontal stabilizer and elevators located forward of the wing.
Also called canard wing. one of two small lifting wings located in front of the main wings.
an early airplane having a pusher engine with the rudder and elevator assembly in front of the wings.

Origin
Old French
1840-1850; < French: literally, duck; Old French quanart drake, orig. cackler, equivalent to can (er) to cackle (of expressive orig.) + -art -art, as in mallart drake; see mallard

Dictionary.com

Examples from the web for canard
– There’s that canard again, from people who ought to know better.
– And the canard about tenure making it difficult to fire teachers is ridiculous.
– By repeating this false canard you provide an interesting example of the tide of misinformation.

Anagram

narc ad
and car

Today’s aphorism

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

– Margaret Atwood, from The Handmaid’s Tale.

On this day

13 February 1915 – birth of General Aung San, founder of modern day Burma and Burmese Army. Father of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician, activist and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient.

13 February 1920 – the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland is recognised by the League of Nations (predecessor of the United Nations).

13 – 15 February 1945 – the bombing of Dresden in which 722 British and 527 USAF aircraft drop more than 3,900 tons of explosives on Dresden, Germany. At the time, Nazi Germany claimed more than 300,000 casualties, however, an official report in 2010 claimed that casualties were around 25,000, historians generally number the casualties between 35,000 and 135,000. Because of the number of refugees in the city, it is unlikely the exact figure will ever be known.

13 February 2008 – Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologises to Australia’s indigenous peoples, particularly those of the stolen generation from whom children were forcibly removed from their parents.