As a sworty duck

Posted by Smokey Stover on January 11, 2010 at 16:22

In Reply to: As a sworty duck posted by Linda Harrison on January 05, 2010 at 12:48:

: My grandmother had an old saying that something was 'as fast as a sworty duck'. Does anyone know where this originated or have heard it?

"Sworty" is a variant of "swarty," which is a variant of swarthy, meaning, when it comes to ducks, dark. There is no duck commonly called swarty or swarthy (to my limited knowledge), but one of the more than one hundred species of duck is called "black duck." I don't know if it is especially fast, however.
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