Brewer's: Duck

A lame duck. A stock-jobber who will not, or cannot, pay his losses. He has to “waddle out of the alley like a lame duck.”

Like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.
Quite chop-fallen.

To get a duck.
A contraction of duck's egg or 0, in cricket. A player who gets no run off his bat is marked down 0.
Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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