“Lame Duck Alley,” according to the article, was a name reporters gave to “a screened-off corridor in the White House offices, where statesmen who went down in the recent electoral combat may meet.”īut “lame duck” had been used earlier, in 18th-century England, to refer to someone defaulting on a debt. This American expression dates from the early 20th century.įor example, the OED cites an article that ran in the New York Evening Post in December 1910. You’ve heard the expression “lame duck” used to mean an officer-holder who’s been defeated in an election or can’t serve another term. “His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect,” from William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818).

Mourtray lost all patience,” from Elizabeth Hervey’s novel The Mourtray Family (1800).

“Her account was so lame and imperfect, that Mrs. “The Theory of Comets, which at present is very lame and defective,” from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726). “Our Argument … will be very lame and precarious,” from Richard Bentley’s A Dissertation Upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699). “Tables, or other Repertories … are oftentimes short, and give a lame account of the Subject sought for,” from Sir Matthew Hale’s Preface to H. “I will not contend much with him about the Proposition, which is lame to the ground,” from John Canne’s A Necessitie of Separation From the Church of England (1634). “O most lame and impotent conclusion,” from Shakespeare’s Othello (before 1616). Here are a few of the examples cited in the OED. The word has been used in this figurative way ever since. (A modern version: “I pray you meekly not to blame me if any word might be lame, for just as my author said, I say the same.”) (circa 1366), he used the phrase “in soule to be lame” (that is, to be lame in one’s soul).Ĭhaucer later wrote, in his long poem Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1374): “Disblameth my yf ony word be lame. of an argument, excuse, account, narrative, or the like.”Ĭhaucer was the first to use the word in an other-than-literal way. The OED defines this figurative sense as meaning “imperfect or defective, unsatisfactory as wanting a part or parts.

The word was first used this way by the Benedictine abbot and scholar Aelfric in his Lives of Saints, and this is what the word still means today in its literal sense.īut a figurative usage emerged in the 1300s. disabled in the foot or leg, so as to walk haltingly or be unable to walk.” The OED defines this later meaning as “disabled through injury to, or defect in, a limb spec. This meaning is now considered obsolete, but a similar sense developed around the year 1000. When “lame” first came into English, the OED says, it meant “disabled or impaired in any way weak, infirm paralysed unable to move.” And there’s a connection with Old Church Slavonic, in which lomiti meant to break. The word “lame,” which is extremely old, was written as lama or loma when it was first recorded in Old English in the year 725.Īs for its ancestry, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that there were corresponding words in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High and Middle High German, and Old Norse. We certainly didn’t intend to be insensitive when we used the word in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. (We called a false etymology of the name Fiat “pretty lame”).īut we’re glad you brought this up, since it gives us a chance to examine the word more closely. Is the use of “lame” in a figurative sense (as in “a lame argument” or “a lame excuse”) insensitive or politically incorrect? But perhaps it has nothing to do with actually being disabled.Ī: You raise an interesting question. Q: I’m surprised that you use the word “lame” in Origins of the Specious to mean bad. I taught a student with cerebral palsy and this use of “lame” seems insensitive to me.

Pretty lame meaning in english