baby duck syndrome
- noun
- Jargon
:
síndrome del pato bebé
- Many users exhibit baby duck syndrome when adapting to new technology, preferring what they learned first.
Examples
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The new software team struggled with baby duck syndrome, resisting changes to their original tools.
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Many employees experience baby duck syndrome when they start new jobs.
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His tendency to stick with familiar routines at work is a classic case of baby duck syndrome.
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Have you noticed the baby duck syndrome in your team?
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Many users exhibit baby duck syndrome when adapting to new technology, preferring what they learned first.
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His tendency to stick with familiar routines at work is a classic case of baby duck syndrome.
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The new software team struggled with baby duck syndrome, resisting changes to their original tools.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase depends on a biological/metaphorical concept (duckling imprinting) — knowing 'baby', 'duck', and 'syndrome' gives a general sense of a condition related to baby ducks but does not directly yield the specific idea of becoming attached to the first system encountered. Because the meaning is motivated by an extra-cultural fact (imprinting) rather than by straightforward composition, learners with only the constituent-word knowledge may only partially infer it and would typically need background knowledge to get the exact sense.
Etymology
Baby duck syndrome comes from how baby ducks often follow the first moving thing they see after hatching. One popular story says these ducklings stick with that first figure, so the phrase now describes people who quickly become 'attached' to the first tool or way of doing things they learn and find it hard to change.
