sauce [ME] This goes back to Latin sal *salt, along with sausage [LME]. The expression what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander implies that both sexes should be able to behave in the same way. John Ray, who recorded the saying in his English Proverbs of 1670, remarked that ‘This is a woman’s Proverb’. Cups now sit on saucers, but in the Middle Ages a saucer was used for holding condiments or sauces, and was usually made of metal. The description saucy originally simply meant ‘savoury, flavoured with a sauce’. In the early 16th century it began to refer to people and behaviour, meaning at first ‘impudent, presumptuous’, mellowing into ‘cheeky’, then taking on suggestive overtones.