Got Any Duck Food?

Last week I was complaining on Facebook about a number of small issues, the kind of annoyances that are sometimes called first world problems.

Example:
The company that services our furnace had called and said we were about due and would tomorrow be convenient?  We said it would be and set up an appointment for between 10 and noon.

I cleared the space around the furnace and we made sure to be home at the scheduled time.  At 12:30 we gave up and called the company. The clerk said she had no record of an appointment.  (Let me remind you: they had called us.)  She apologized and we set up an appointment for the 16^th.

An hour later I received an email from them confirming our appointment – for the 13^th. Right time, wrong day.

And that was how our week had gone, one stupid little annoyance after another, mostly involving companies who couldn't keep their own records straight.

I acknowledged that none of these were big problems but together they felt like being nibbled to death by ducks.

Someone wrote back delighted by the phrase and I wondered if it was possible they had not heard it before. And that got me wondering: where does it come from?

Which sent me to the Ngram Viewer. I have written about this tool before which lets you harness the power of the millions of publications scanned by Google to trace the use of a word or phrase.

The earliest reference it pulled up was from an 1813 book of proverbs: "One had as good be nibbled to death, or pecked to death by a hen."  They offer no explanation but it appears to mean that one stupid fate is as bad as another.

Two ducks.  See them both?

(On the same page the author helpfully explains that "to dine with Sir Humphrey" means to go without your dinner.  Glad we got that cleared up.)

Actually, the Viewer also pulled up a comic song from 1810 which says that if a person misbehaves with women "sic a fellow desarves to be nibbled to death by ducks, as the worm said to the fisherman."

In 1865 Thomas Mozley wrote that sitting through sermons in his childhood had given him the fidgets, which felt  like "being nibbled to death by ducks, or scraped to death with oyster shells."

In 1868 Charles Sturgeon wrote a pamphlet warning trade unionists that the government was treating them like a man who tickled his rich wives to death and said that if they follow along "you will deserve not only to be tickled to death but nibbled to death by ducks."

I finally found what was clearly the correct meaning (which is to say, mine) in an engineering magazine in 1874. The writer complained of "the old, old story:" a great man with a great idea nibbled to death by ducks.

Let's jump to modern times. Laura McCullough wrote a delightful article about the life of an academic administrator. She bought a box of 100 little rubber ducks and every time her work was interrupted she moved a duck from one box to another.  It made both her and the interrupters aware of some of the obstacles to her productivity. 

My faculty took it very well and joined in with the exercise in a playful spirit. One professor brought in a nice wicker basket for the ducks to live in at the start of their day. Her children decorated my “nibbled” box with pictures of ducks and the word “nibble” scribbled all over it.

And speaking of productivity, now that I have my (ahem) ducks in a row, I'm going to write some fiction.

But one more thing: if you don't understand the title, see this.