goose [OE] Goose is an ancient word that can be traced through European languages back to Indo-European. Geese have long been a mainstay of the farmyard, and are found in several idioms. If someone kills the goose that lays the golden eggs they destroy a reliable and valuable source of income. In one of Aesop’s fables a man finds that one of his geese lays eggs of pure gold, which make him rich. But he grows dissatisfied with just one egg a day, and kills the goose in the mistaken belief that it will be filled with golden eggs. There is no gold inside it and no longer any more golden eggs. In English the fable is first referred to by William Caxton in 1484. In America a goose egg is a score of zero in baseball and other sports. This derives from the egg shape of 0, in just the same way as does the cricketing term *duck (originally ‘a duck’s egg’). We associate the military marching step known as the goose-step with the Nazis, but the term was recorded much earlier than the 1930s, at the beginning of the 19th century. Goose-stepping soldiers advance by swinging each leg stiffly forwards without bending it at the knee, in a way reminiscent of geese. To goose someone [L19th] is to poke their bottom as a joke. This meaning probably comes from the way that geese can be aggressive and ready to peck at people unexpectedly; the verb had several earlier meanings including to hiss like geese in order to show disapproval in the theatre [M19th]. A gooseberry [M16th] may be a modified version of German Krausebeere or the French dialect gozelle, but it may simply have been created by combining the existing words goose and berry. The ‘unwanted third party’ sense, as in to play gooseberry, dates from the mid 19th century, but there was an earlier term to play old gooseberry [L18th] meaning ‘to make havoc’. See also gossamer, sauce.