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Reader question: Please explain this sentence (“sitting duck” in particular): “Your PC is a sitting duck for hackers”. My comments: That means your personal computer is vulnerable to attacks from hackers – program-savvy people who break into your computer to, say, steal information – and you’re often unaware of such attacks and remain helpless, unable at all to prevent it from happening. “Sitting duck” essentially means that you’re in a defenseless position, just like a duck sitting on her eggs. A duck hatching her eggs will not move, hence becoming an easy target for hunters. Indeed it is those early hunters in North America and other places who invented this phrase some one hundred years ago – when they found that sitting ducks are easy for them to fire at and kill. Pretty mean, you say. Yes, I agree. There was a great lack of sportsmanship and fair play on the part of hunters. I mean, to have the cheek to fire at hatching ducks for fun and to talk about it later? Well, hunters would say that “sitting ducks” were not actually wild ducks or geese sitting on eggs. “Sitting ducks” merely stood for any birds sitting on water – hence the meaning of a stationary target becoming an easy target. Either way, sitting ducks or swimming ducks, it was still mean – and unfair – for hunters to shoot at birds when they are not in flight. Birds sitting on water may just be there killing time. Unlike people, especially those in today’s workforce, ducks are not always hurrying to accomplish this and that. Sitting on water, they’re just having a good time, completely unaware of lurking hunters taking aim at them. | 
