Duck breakage

[Bagwan]

I am in the dark on this one . Somebody enlighten me , please .

Where in the heck did the term : "breaking one's duck" , come from ?



Breaker , breaker , one-nine , this here's the broken duck .
If a duck breaks in the forest , does anybody win ?
How much wood would a wood duck break if a wood duck could break ducks ?

I am in the dark on this one . Somebody enlighten me , please .

Where in the heck did the term : "breaking one's duck" , come from ?



Breaker , breaker , one-nine , this here's the broken duck .
If a duck breaks in the forest , does anybody win ?
How much wood would a wood duck break if a wood duck could break ducks ?

'Tis a play on a cricket term, my old bean. Should one fail to score any runs before one is given out, then one is said to have scored a 'duck'.

Breaking one's 'duck' means one has notched up a score.




Although I've no idea why cricket came up with the term.

[Bagwan]

'Tis a play on a cricket term, my old bean. Should one fail to score any runs before one is given out, then one is said to have scored a 'duck'.

Breaking one's 'duck' means one has notched up a score.




Although I've no idea why cricket came up with the term.

Thanks for that Tam , my burello friend .
I had thought it a wild goose hunting term .

What does PETA have to say about this cruel practice of breaking ducks in cricket ? I know they are hard on the fox hunt .

[agwiii]

Thanks for that Tam , my burello friend .
I had thought it a wild goose hunting term.

I thought it was something even more fowl.

[Ranger]

Well, you don't exactly "break" ducks on cricket. If you get a run after a long time of scoring no runs, it's usually called "getting off the mark", not "breaking the duck".

A duck is getting out without a run.

"Breaking the duck" is just a play on this, and I've only heard it used in F1 sites.

[EuroTroll]

Actually, like most phrases in the English language, it derives from the life and work of Stirling Moss. As many of you know, Moss was an avid duck racer in his youth and won several international races in the late 1930s on his duck, the William Shakespeare II.

Specifically, the phrase comes from the experience Moss had with the duck who was undoubtedly the fastest bird on his farm - Duffy. Moss had tried to race Duffy as early as 1943, but the bird would not be broken and kept throwing him off the saddle. For the next four years, no effort was spared to break the duck, as Moss knew full well that there would be no serious opposition to him in the traditional London-Rotterdam if he could participate in the race with Duffy.

But by 1947 it was becoming clear that Duffy would not be broken and when the bird finally died in 1948, Moss became so bitterly disillusioned with duck racing that he gave it up and took up car racing instead.

His car racing career was, of course, a huge success but he could never win the F1 World Championship despite his obvious talent and wonderful sporting spirit. After a while, people starting saying that "As great as he is, Moss can't win the World Championship, just like he couldn't break his duck". And so the saying was born, and over time the phrase "to break one's duck" became to mean "achieving something great after a long and arduous effort", especially in car racing circles.

[Ranger]

Actually, like most phrases in the English language, it derives from the life and work of Stirling Moss. As many of you know, Moss was an avid duck racer in his youth and won several international races in the late 1930s on his duck, the William Shakespeare II.

Specifically, the phrase comes from the experience Moss had with the duck who was undoubtedly the fastest bird on his farm - Duffy. Moss had tried to race Duffy as early as 1943, but the bird would not be broken and kept throwing him off the saddle. For the next four years, no effort was spared to break the duck, as Moss knew full well that there would be no serious opposition to him in the traditional London-Rotterdam if he could participate in the race with Duffy.

But by 1947 it was becoming clear that Duffy would not be broken and when the bird finally died in 1948, Moss became so bitterly disillusioned with duck racing that he gave it up and took up car racing instead.

His car racing career was, of course, a huge success but he could never win the F1 World Championship despite his obvious talent and wonderful sporting spirit. After a while, people starting saying that "As great as he is, Moss can't win the World Championship, just like he couldn't break his duck". And so the saying was born, and over time the phrase "to break one's duck" became to mean "achieving something great after a long and arduous effort", especially in car racing circles.

You should be his official biographer!

[Eyo]

Great story!

[Juppe]

Studiose's version is a lot funnier, though...


http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bre2.htm

[Q] From Patrice Kyger: “In a report about Sheffield United football club appeared this: ‘After seeing them break their duck, Warnock is confident that they will emerge as genuine promotion contenders.’ Where does break one’s duck come from and what does it mean?”

[A] It’s not as cruel as it sounds. It’s not the duck that’s being broken, but a duck’s egg. These days the expression can be used in almost any game that involves a score of some sort but originally—back in Victorian times—it related solely to cricket. It seems to have been English public-school slang of the 1850s to call a score of nought against a player’s name a duck’s egg—presumably a duck rather than a chicken because a duck’s egg is bigger and more prominent.

A player who had scored, who had moved off that accusing zero on the scoreboard, was said to have broken his duck’s egg. It began to appear in print in the early 1860s and soon people shortened it just to duck. The first known example of that form appeared in the Daily News in August 1868: “You see ... that his fear of a ‘duck’—as by a pardonable contraction from duck-egg a nought is called in cricket-play—outweighs all other earthly considerations.” A batsman who was dismissed without scoring was said to be out for a duck.

It’s only in comparatively recent times that the expression has broadened to other games and to the performance of whole teams rather than individual players. In the report you quote, it means that the soccer team concerned has won a match, that their count of wins has moved off zero, an extension that is so figurative as to suggest it might be a misunderstanding of the original meaning. Though the expression is known from all cricket-playing English-speaking countries, it’s only in British usage, I think, that you can apply it generally to achieving some particular feat for the first time.

Americans briefly knew of duck’s eggs in the 1860s, but prefer now to speak of goose eggs in much the same sense, a slang term that is almost exactly contemporary with the cricket one. A related expression also originally from cricket is to lay an egg, so to score a zero; that might be the source of the theatrical version from the 1920s onwards that says an actor or a show is a failure or a flop, but it might instead be from airman’s slang of the First World War, meaning to drop a bomb.

It’s often said that the equivalent term love in tennis and some other games for a zero score likewise derives from the shape of an egg, in this case the French l’oeuf. To forestall lots of e-mails, I should say it’s a folk etymology. There is no known such link between the French word and the English one, and the term love is recorded in English in 1742, in Hoyle’s famous book on the game of whist, a century before anybody used the egg analogy in cricket, and even longer before the game of lawn tennis was invented. (Though real tennis is several centuries older, it didn’t use the term.) It is probable that love is from playing for love, that is, for pleasure rather than money, so that it doesn’t matter if one hasn’t (yet) scored.

[agwiii]

Actually, like most phrases in the English language, it derives from the life and work of Stirling Moss. As many of you know, Moss was an avid duck racer in his youth and won several international races in the late 1930s on his duck, the William Shakespeare II.

Specifically, the phrase comes from the experience Moss had with the duck who was undoubtedly the fastest bird on his farm - Duffy. Moss had tried to race Duffy as early as 1943, but the bird would not be broken and kept throwing him off the saddle. For the next four years, no effort was spared to break the duck, as Moss knew full well that there would be no serious opposition to him in the traditional London-Rotterdam if he could participate in the race with Duffy.

But by 1947 it was becoming clear that Duffy would not be broken and when the bird finally died in 1948, Moss became so bitterly disillusioned with duck racing that he gave it up and took up car racing instead.

His car racing career was, of course, a huge success but he could never win the F1 World Championship despite his obvious talent and wonderful sporting spirit. After a while, people starting saying that "As great as he is, Moss can't win the World Championship, just like he couldn't break his duck". And so the saying was born, and over time the phrase "to break one's duck" became to mean "achieving something great after a long and arduous effort", especially in car racing circles.

OMG! Another quack!