Word: Canard
You Pronounce It: [kuh-nahrd; French ka-nar] Definition: noun, plural canards [kuh-nahrdz; French ka-nar]
1. a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor.
2. Cookery. a duck intended or used for food.
3. Aeronautics.
an airplane that has its horizontal stabilizer and elevators located forward of the wing.
Also called canard wing. one of two small lifting wings located in front of the main wings.
an early airplane having a pusher engine with the rudder and elevator assembly in front of the wings.
I found it:
Andre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (1985)
Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. We see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality. And who asks the question: am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? (Even the latter is no mean task, but one that must be rather seen within the context of a true alteration of the texture of our lives.)
Works Cited:
Mrs. Lady Renaissance 