IdiomAnimals
English
Englishlame duck
Meaning: A person who holds an office but has little real influence because he or she has not been reelected.
Example: “With his successor already elected, the governor is a lame duck until January.”
Origin: From the 18th-century London stock exchange, where a "lame duck" was a broker who could not pay his debts; Horace Walpole used it in a 1761 letter. In the United States from the 1860s it came to mean an official whose power has faded because a successor has already been chosen.
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