Sunday, November 07, 2010

 

Quackocracy

Phil F. writes anent yesterday's post on Carlyle:
By the way, if I remember my Orwell, isn't a quackocracy a ducktatorship of the most foul?
Or "the most fowl". I can't find this pun (an excellent one) in Orwell. A 1942 film was entitled The Ducktators, and the word "ducktator" supposedly occurred in the 1938 cartoon What Price Porky.

More from Thomas Carlyle on quackery, from The French Revolution: A History, Part II, Book III, Chapter II:
Men that go mincing, grimacing, with plausible speech and brushed raiment; hollow within: Quacks political; Quacks scientific, academical: all with a fellow-feeling for each other, and kind of Quack public-spirit!
The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. quack, n.2, has some compounds of quack (meaning charlatan), but not quackocracy.

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