Something About Lord Love a Duck!

Egg on your face?

I was discussing ducks recently. The chatty one in the television advertisements. The ones involved in the game with a goose. Anatidaephobia. That's when I saw February 6 was National Lame Duck Day. I had to look that one up.

The day recognizes the ratification of the 20th Amendment to the United States Constitution or the Lame Duck Amendment. The 20th Amendment changed the date the newly elected president took office from March 4 to January 20. During a lame-duck session, members of Congress are no longer accountable to their constituents. It is possible for their focus to switch to more personal gain instead of acting on behalf of their constituents with an eye toward re-election.

I don't have much to say on lame ducks so I thought I'd put something forward on lord love a duck, the strange expression Miss Eells used in The Dark Secret of Weatherend (1984). I knew it was the name of a 1966 film starring Roddy McDowall and Tuesday Weld. It wasn't until I came upon Michael Quinion's World Wide Words when I understood it a bit more:

It’s a mild and inoffensive expression of surprise, once well-known in Britain and dating from the latter years of the nineteenth century.

Well, sort of understood it. It does strike me as something British. Bellairs lived in the Bristol area close to six months back in 1967, and maybe people there used it. I'm sure it struck him as odd, and he found it useful in his writings. Why did Miss Eells say it and not, say, Professor Childermass?

Lord love a duck, don't worry about it!