I know it’s a 1966 movie and Michael Quinion writes of the expression’s uses in early 20th-century literature, but so far I’ve been unable to locate any firm hypotheses about the origins of the exclamation, “Lord love a duck!” Any ideas?
I’ll give the obvious answer, namely, that it rhymes with “fuck”.
The phrase is used by the carthorse in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, a 1949 Disney animated picture.
The origin is cloudy other than the fact it appears to have originated in the UK. Searching around, it looks like the earliest cite is from 1907, though it may be older.
And etymologists don’t think that it has anything to do with “fuck,” since its early usages didn’t indicate anything risque about it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the choice of a duck over some other animal was nothing more than the phenomenon that a lot of people find ducks inherently funny, in much the same way that Gary Larson seems to think that cows are a punchline, just by existing. We’re left with why somebody would start using “Lord love a <generic animal>”. “Lord love a bluebird” doesn’t have much of a ring - “Lord love a duck” quacks people up.
I shall now go dabble in some other thread.
Michael Quinion’s take on it at World Wide Words.
Love a duck is a common expression where I grew up, in Derby, UK. So maybe origin in The Midlands?
It’s definitely an archaic London working-class expression, I didn’t realise that it was used outside of the UK as you wouldn’t use in the UK as part of normal speech.
As it originates from the same place as cockney rhyming slang, I would say that it at least sounds plausible that it originated as a rhyming slang term for ‘fuck’. Cockney rhyming slang originated in the first half of the 19th century which means that the expression plausibly had plenty of time to have lost it’s original offensiveness by the time it first appeared in print. For example the word ‘berk’ is believed to originate as rhyming slang for the word ‘cunt’ (Berkley Hunt) around about 1930s, but, despite the continued offensiveness of the orginal word, it is seen nowadays as only a mild and inoffensive insult (okay for example to broadcast on UK prime time TV by the 1980s).
Michael Quinion found a 1907 cite in his article linked in one of the posts above. Google Books search turns up an earlier one from 1900 (although according to Wikipedia the book, A Voyage at Anchor by William Clark Russell, was first published a year earlier in 1899.) Here’s the passage:
That’s where the Google snippet cuts off. Intriguingly Russell is an American author, although of course one can’t read too much into that. It would be interesting to see whether any earlier findings that turn up are American or British. I would have thought this a quintessentially Cockney phrase but you never can tell with these things.
Interesting, though reading the book quickly I notice the character who said that is presumably English as are most of the characters and it seems to take place on the Kent coast. Reading Russell’s biography, he certainly would’ve had a good idea of authentic British slang as his father was English and he himself served in the British Merchant Navy.
Interestingly in the same book, the phrase “Lawks, love a daisy!” appears in the same book.
Nah. He was born in the US, but his dad was English and he lived and worked his whole life in England. He’s as British as can be.
So, it’s a British expression.
Good find, aldi.
My uncle used the phrase after returning from WWII, but, never before. I/m guessing he learned it from his English counterparts.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of Russell’s British bent. That makes far more sense. Thank you, sam.
That is not how rhyming slang really works, though (as, indeed, is illustrated by your Berkley Hunt, example). It is actually a sort of mnemonic code, where you take the word you want to encode, associate it with a brief common phrase that rhymes with it, and then use the other main word of the phrase in place of the original. Thus, if your original word is “stairs”, you associate it with the rhyming phrase “apples and pears”, and then use “apples” whenever you want to refer to stairs. You would never refer to them as “pears”. Likewise, your wife becomes your trouble (from “trouble and strife”), your feet become your plates (from “plates of meat”), and so on.
I do not know if there is real, traditional rhyming slag for “fuck”, but, if there were, it would work something like this:
Fuck —> muscovy duck —> muscovy
So a cockney lad might say to his girl: “Hey darlin’, ‘ow about a muscovy?”
A cockney would not say “duck” to mean fuck, although if “Lord love a duck” was an already established common expression at the time rhyming slang developed, he might say “Hey darlin’ ‘ow about a lord?”
This possibly originally has nothing to do with the bird. “Duck,” meaning “dear one,” is used in Shakespeare (Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.276). OED says this is a transferred use, but other sources suggest other derivations: a comparison with Danish dukke, “doll,” makes sense to me, and there’s a few other derivations from Old English that make less sense. Apparently the earliest use to refer to a person is recorded from the 1580s.
“My little chickadee.”
I’ll bet its what you call your wife, too. 
And of course “duck” itself is a common form of friendly address in the East Midlands, which perhaps ties in to Dr. Drake’s point.
However, I wonder if sometimes we try too hard to find neat etymological explanations for these things. Maybe “love a duck” became popular simply because someone randomly came up with it as a variation of the common exclamation “Lord love me”, and other people just liked the sound of it.
I’m from London, it’s usual to use the whole rhyming phrase, especially when you want to emphasise the meaning original meaning. So for example, you might say “Get in the britneys!”, but you might equally say “Get in the britney spears!” when you wanted to someone to order a round of drinks. Some of the older phrases like “apples and pears” and “trouble and strife” are rarely contracted so that they don’t rhyme with their actual meaning and indeed some of the modern ones too(e.g. people only usually say “It’s all gone horribly pete tong!” as opposed to “It’s all gone horribly pete!”).
Of course! Everyone loves me, for example.