Anu writes, While the connection with quicksilver
is enticing, it's their duck-like behavior while peddling the snake oil
that gave us this colorful synonym for a charlatan.

Hmmm. Duck-like behavior. Did Anu mean "paddling" for "peddling" here?

Bird regards,
Duck-Duck

duck-like? anatine

(not as useful a word as anserine)

Anserine is very useful for describing all-over silliness. I like anatine, too, but ever since Thanksgiving no one has yet provided the companion term for turkeys, and with so many turkeys about in so many forms, that adjective would be a very useful one to have in reserve.

I must go look up anadine...

Anatine made me think of anadine, so I looked it up.

Finig. (My word for zero although it is presently none-existant.) Anyway, although anadine wasn't a word, canadine was, and it's pretty much useless to most of us, but I'll paste its definition just so you can enjoy, along with me, the delicious freedom of probably never having cause to memorize this definition, unless you're a chemist or a doctor:

canadine

C20H21NO4; tetrahydroberberine;an alkaloid present in Hydrastis canadensis (family Ranunculaceae) and in Corydalis cava
(family Fumaraceae) with sedative and muscle relaxant properties.

Synonym: xanthopuccine.

...now:xanthopuccine: that's a cool word! I think it's from the poem, "In Xanthodu did Kubla Kahn a stately porcupine decree..." or something along those lines.

turkeys, it turns out, go by meleagrine; damp-squid, that.

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here's an amusing thing: another word for squib is fizgig, which has some other interesting senses as well.

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I had previously seen "quacksalver" derived from "quicksiver=mercury", which quacks may indeed have used in some of their salves, but as Wordsmith says, there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of the onomatopoietiecal ornithological origin.

Is it just coincidence that you stumbled upon canadine, in the context of a discussion of anserine? Might we be thinking of the Canadian Goose?

Canadine Anserine, Canadian Goose--oh, thanks for that, AR! Jung would say this realization was destined to be!

And many thanks, tsuwm, for the turkey word. I'll go back, copy it out, and commit it to memory! (And I'm serious here and not joking at all because I really have wanted that turkey of an adjective for a long time now...)

Thanks, tsuwm. I had heard of histomonas meleagridis, and mycoplama meleagridis, both of which are serious diseases of turkeys. But I didn't know before that "meleagridis" meant "of turkeys".