Americans have a special term to describe a president who has lost an election in November but has to remain in office until the following January. This year, however, that term was being used to describe Joe Biden as early as July, when he announced he would not be running for office again. As the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times put it, Biden had become “that creature most dreaded in the Oval Office: a lame duck, a commander in chief on the way out who is being challenged to assert his relevance even as the world moves on.”
Lame duck originally comes from stock exchange slang of the 18th century, referring to an unsuccessful speculator who defaulted on financial promises (in contrast to a bull and a bear, speculators who buy assets expecting them to rise, or fall, respectively). A lame duck was a dealer who could not pay his losses and had to waddle “like a lame duck” along Exchange Alley, the snicket in the City of London between the Royal Exchange and the Post Office which was lined with coffeehouses where traders shared secrets.
The expression was a favourite of Horace Walpole, the 18th-century writer and youngest son of the first British prime minister. One of the earliest written records of lame duck comes in a letter from him to the British diplomat Horace Mann in 1761. Walpole was never a fan of owning shares (“I had rather have a Bronze than a thousand pounds in the Stocks; for if Ireland or Jamaica are invaded, I shall still have my bronze”), and asked Mann, “Do you know what a bull and a bear and a lame duck are? Nay, nor I either: I am only certain that they are neither animals or fowl...” Ten years later, in a letter discussing gout, he told the amateur architect John Chute: “I may be lame, but I shall never be a duck, nor deal in the garbage of the Alley.”
The stock exchange sense is still occasionally used today. The expression has meant many things, from damaged ships to a “rascal” in Australia to rhyming slang for “fuck”. But its general sense of “someone or something that is ineffectual or unlikely to succeed without extra help” has been the most salient meaning since the mid-19th century. It was at this time that the American political sense also emerged, eventually spawning expressions such as the lame duck session, to refer to a session of Congress held after an election when outgoing members are still in post and their successors are yet to begin.
He may be a lame duck, but Biden has not lost his sense of humour. When he recently hosted a group of social media influencers, he told them that, despite all the lies and hate on social media, “you break through in ways that I think are going to change the entire dynamic of the way in which we communicate”. “And that’s why I invited you to the White House,” he joked, “because I’m looking for a job!”
