The expression “paying the price” is in common use. Although it is an idiom, that is, a phrase whose meaning cannot be deduced from the words that compose it, almost everyone uses it in the appropriate context. “In the end I’m going to pay the price for the fight between Luis and Miguel.” “Politicians are always the same; they make promises that not even they believe, and citizens have to pay the price.” “If someone has to pay the price, he should be the one to blame, not poor Paco.” It is enough to cite these examples to get an idea of what this colloquial phrase means. It is more complex to delve into its origin. Because where does this expression come from?
Let’s start by having an academic definition. In the Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the RAE, “pay the duck” means “to suffer or bear punishment or punishment that is not deserved, or that has been deserved by another.” There is, therefore, no surprise; The phrase is used to refer to someone who has been unfairly blamed for something. We talked about paying for another.
Now, the origin of the phrase has nothing to do with the palmiped aquatic bird. It is not about buying a duck on a farm or paying in a restaurant for a dish made with a specimen of the duck family. In fact, that duck is a phonetic simplification of pact. There are no feathers involved and there is a much murkier reference.
And “paying the price” is an ancient saying created as a mockery against the Jews. Without a doubt, José María Iribarren was the one who best searched ancient texts to discover the origin of the idiom. In The Why of Sayings, Iribarren recovers the Castilian Bible, by Casiodoro Reina (Basel, 1569) to find the origin: “Like the words Torah and Covenant, used by the Spanish Jews, the first for the Law and the second for the concert of God, for which the Spaniards accused them [they accused the Jews] of having a painted Torah or heifer in their synagogue, which they worshiped; and from the Covenant they took as a proverb: ‘Here you will pay the price.’
In summary, the expression pay the duck was created by Christians in the 16th century, deforming the term pact, in reference to the pact that the Judeo-Spanish had made with God, into duck as a clever insult. They also changed the word Torah to torah or heifer with the same intention of mockery.
This is a reflection of the old anti-Judaism with religious roots that has survived to this day, although in the case of “paying the price” there is no longer any trace of that attitude. Uriel Macías, a specialist in the history of Jews in contemporary Spain and in Jewish bibliography in Spanish, recounted in an interview with EL MUNDO other examples of the ancient tendency against the Jews that still survive today:
“In celebrations and commemorations, almost all of them linked to the Catholic Church, but protected by the city councils themselves, based on anti-Jewish legends, such as the veneration of the Santo Niño de la Guardia in Toledo, on a false accusation of a ritual crime from the 15th century Or La Catorcena, in Segovia. Or in the survival of expressions, in some towns in Castilla León, during Holy Week, such as ‘going to kill Jews’, which is drinking a type of lemonade with something added,” explains Macías.
Iribarren also mentions another theory about the Basque origin of the expression “pay the duck”, pointing to the work Phraseology, or Castilian Stylistics (1924), by Cejador, where it is said that duck is bat in Basque, which means equal or one. But “his explanation of it cannot convince anyone,” says the lexicographer and paremiologist. Nor are other theories that can be found on the internet convincing, such as the one that talks about an ancient Italian tradition, where guests at a party were responsible for paying the bill for the dinner.