Meaning
An officeholder, especially in the United States, whose term is ending, who cannot or will not stand again, and whose influence is therefore fading. Loosely, any person, business, or project that has lost power or effectiveness and is simply marking time. The political sense now dominates. Dismissive political register; the original stock-trading sense is obsolete and would now be read as historical. Regional use: General English; political sense arose in American English.
Origin
The phrase began as London Stock Exchange slang of the 1760s for a trader who defaulted on his debts. The earliest known use is Horace Walpole's letter to Sir Horace Mann of 1761: 'Do you know what a Bull, and a Bear, and a Lame Duck are?' Period jokes about ruined stockjobbers waddling out of Exchange Alley (David Garrick, 1771: 'Change-Alley bankrupts waddle out lame ducks!'; Edinburgh Advertiser, 1772) explain the limp, waddling bird. The finance sense later died out. In America the word broadened to any insolvent defaulter and then to politicians: the earliest known political use is the Congressional Globe of 14 January 1863, guarding against 'lame ducks' or broken down politicians, and the first application to a sitting president came in 1926, when a Wisconsin paper asked whether Coolidge would become 'a lame duck president'. The 20th Amendment (1933), which shortened the post-election wait, is nicknamed the Lame Duck Amendment.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- lame duck period
- lame-duck Congress
- lame-duck president
- lame-duck session
Usage Examples
- Colleagues stopped returning her calls once the election result made her a lame duck with only ten weeks left in office.
- During the lame-duck session, the outgoing majority pushed through a last round of appointments.
- Critics say the airline has been a lame duck since the merger collapsed, kept alive only by government loans.