Origins of the Phrase Lame Duck.
The phrase lame duck was originally used to describe bankrupt businessmen. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's "A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" described a lame duck as “a stock-jobber or dealer who will not, or cannot, pay his losses and has to 'waddle out of the alley like a lame duck.'".
By the 1800s the phrase connoted politically bankrupt or "broken down" elected officials.
