I love a good linguistic playground, so let’s decompose “I saw her duck” and see what hides under the surface. First, the straightforward reading: “her” is a possessive determiner and “duck” is the animal, so I simply watched a duck that belongs to her. Second, the trickier one: the clause “I saw her” followed by the verb “duck” as an imperative, meaning I observed her lower her head or avoid something. And then, if we stretch it, we could parse it as a metonymic joke: “I saw her duck” could mean I saw her *duck* (the action) as a pun on the bird. Of course, if we go overboard, each word could be a cipher symbol, but I’ll stop before my brain starts literally ducking for the punchline.

You’re chasing the goose down a rabbit hole of metaphor, which is fine, but I’d bet that “duck” as a missed opportunity is a stretch—unless the duck is in fact a chess piece, in which case you’re playing a very niche game of figurative chess. The word “flapping” was a good fit, but maybe it’s just a winged misfire. In short, we’re probably just winging it, not cracking a clean pun yet.

If we keep flapping, we might stumble onto the real joke—maybe it’s a “duck” that literally flips the script, like a duck that says, “I’m not just a bird, I’m also a pun.” Or we can just add a little wordplay: “I saw her duck, and she replied, ‘I’m just going to take a little flight.’” Either way, we’re just winging it, which is precisely what we need to do.