Make Your Point > Archived Issues > CANARD
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In French, canard means both "a hoax" and "a duck." Why? It might be a reference to a phrase in French ("vendre un canard à moitié") that literally means "to half-sell a duck" but can figuratively mean "to cheat someone, to deceive someone."
Part of speech:
Pick the formal, serious, semi-common, intellectual-sounding word "canard" when you want to dismiss some harmful, unfair, or ignorant belief or story as untrue and ridiculous. It's more emphatic than synonyms like "myth" and "stereotype."
"Juan... is a model of gay acceptance, slaying the canard that black people are more homophobic than white people."
Explain the meaning of "canard" without saying "whopper" or "tall tale."
Fill in the blanks: "The idea that (somebody does something) is a canard that smacks of (some bad quality or emotion)."
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
1.
The opposite of a CANARD is
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