is canardous 'ducklike', then?
I thought canardous was a near synonym for obfuscatory.
It is from the Canard duck, yes, but it has a metaphorical meaning. I'm not sure why, but a Canard is a piece of misinformation, a hoax or a 'red herring' that leads people to go off on all sorts of tangents. It could, as Dzhaymz has intimated, have an obfuscatory result. Usually those annoying emails that keep circulating contain one or more canards - you know the ones that end with some kind of guilt trip about passing it on to the rest of the world. Canards also regularly appear in urban myths or incorrect etonyms. Here in Australia we have a slang term 'furphy' that is pretty much a synonym of canard. [Furphy
n, pl -
phies Austral slang a rumour or fictitious story [from
Furphy, an Australian manufacturer of water carts in WW1] - Collins Compact Australian Dictionary
A couple of Dictionary definitions of canard:
Collins Australian: "A false report" [French: a duck]
Concise Oxford: "A false report; hoax..." [F, = duck]
