Meaning
To spoil someone's plans, ruin their chances or bring about their downfall, usually through a decisive act, mistake or revelation. Once someone's goose is cooked, their failure or defeat is treated as certain. Informal; can sound triumphant, rueful or threatening depending on who is speaking. Regional use: General English.
Origin
First recorded in Britain in the 1830s: World Wide Words traces variants such as doing his goose for him and cooking his goose from that decade, with an 1837 court report in the London newspaper the True Sun quoting a threat to cook his goose, and the form 'your goose is cooked' appearing in Paddiana, an 1847 book of Irish-life sketches. The true origin is unknown. Colourful explanations circulate - a joke on Jan Hus, the Czech reformer whose name resembles the Czech for goose and who was burned in 1415; a Swedish king enraged by a goose hung from a besieged town's walls; and a town that displayed a goose to prove it had food, only for attackers to destroy it - but etymologists dismiss all of these as implausible given the gap of centuries or the vagueness of the stories. The phrase more plausibly belongs to a family of nineteenth-century cooking and food idioms for finishing someone off, such as settling his hash or giving him his gruel.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cook his goose
- someone's goose is cooked
- the goose is cooked
Usage Examples
- Leaking the memo an hour before the vote cooked the minister's goose.
- One more late filing and your goose is cooked with this committee.
- The stoppage-time penalty cooked our goose, and the whole stadium went quiet.