Loose as a Goose

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Lexicon Valley Introduction

0:30From Washington, D.C., this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, who has a bet noir, a crow to pluck, a pet peeve that makes him madder than a wet hen. His beef is with a common expression that you have undoubtedly heard and almost is certainly never given a second thought to. But Mike has. Has he ever.

1:01Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. Although it does sound like you're about to portray me as persnickety. No, no, heaven forfend. I would say exacting, because I think it's fair to say that when the subject is idiom, you sometimes exhibit very low tolerance for the irrational. Back in the day, we devoted an entire episode to you picking apart the saying, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

1:39Right. And forgive me, but I choose not to relitigate that. But there is this other expression that gives you the vapors, loose as a goose. Vapors. You make me sound like a teenage girl from an 18th century novel. But yes, right, it's an expression that is often synonymous, loose as a goose is, with relaxed, easygoing, chill. Uh-huh, yeah. And that metaphor troubles you why?

Geese Behavior

2:09Well, have you ever met a goose, Bob? Yes. Many a goose have I met. And if you had one word to describe them, what would it be? Okay. How about irritable? Loud, aggressive, and very, very prolific with their excretions.

2:34Yeah, so if you approach a goose, they're quite excitable, right? They're easily flustered. There's nothing especially chill about a goose. It does seem odd. But I've also noticed one other thing. A whole lot of American idiom lives in the animal world. I mentioned a couple in the introduction, madder than a wet hand, for example. But there's so many more, and most of them make perfect sense. Watch like a hawk. Eat like a pig. Like a fish out of water.

3:05At a snail's pace. I could do this forever, Mike. Please don't. Busy as a bee. Get your ducks in a row. Herding cats like a bull in a china shop. And one of my favorite southernisms, a rooster one day and a feather duster the next. All of those idioms, they play on actual characteristics that you might want to apply colorfully to people, right? Unlike loose as a goose. Well, it rhymes, so it has that going for it. Yeah, maybe rhyme is all that you need, in this case, for an expression to take hold.

3:43Yeah. You know, Mike, there's this goose that lives up over the pond near me, and she has a whole mess of goslings. She's got goslings like the Goslins, that fucked up reality TV show family with like eight kids. This goose sends out some kind of flirtatious vibes. I wonder if she's possibly promiscuous, accounting for another pretty judgmental meaning of loose. Huh?

4:13Loose is a goose. Let's put promiscuity aside for the moment. Actually, let's put it aside forever and dig into this from a different direction. First of all, loose as a goose, it's not an expression that Shakespeare coined, say, you know, 500 years ago. It's much more recent than that.

Chicken Little Story

4:33And I want to start with the children's story about Chicken Little. Chicken Little is running around excitedly because it is her belief that the sky is falling. The sky is falling! A piece of it just hit me on the head! I know that to this day, a Chicken Little is someone who is an alarmist, ultimately without merit. Yeah. So it turns out that the Chicken Little story has been in existence for at least a couple hundred years,

5:05floating around in one version or another like children's stories do in different European countries and in different European languages. One of the first versions that we know of in English was in 1840. And it was by this American guy named John Green Chandler, who is from Massachusetts. He published it under the name The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little. And it starts out with her, Ms. Little, running around in somebody's garden when a leaf from a rosebush falls on her tail.

5:42And that, for some reason, triggers her anxiety over the sky falling. She runs to her friend, Hen Pen, gets her all frantic. They take off together to find Duck Luck. And before you know it, it's mass hysteria involving Turkey Lurkey and Goose Loose. So clearly, rhyming the animal name with another word was the pattern. Or, you know, just a coincidence. Coincidence four, five, six times over.

6:14Hen Pen later became Henny Penny. Henny Penny, yeah. Duck Luck became Ducky Lucky. But they still rhymed, right? So this association of loose with goose, if it wasn't established, it was now. Mm-hmm. Incidentally, you don't know how the story ends. Well, I do know that I've been reading the newspaper, and it turns out she's right. The fucking sky is falling. Well, in the original version, this wasn't the case in my memory from when I was a child.

6:45But in the original version, this group of panicked birds run into a guy named Fox Lox, who listens to their story, invites them in, and kills them one by one, and then eats chicken little. That's actually what happens in the book. Uh-huh. A more gothic kind of version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Yeah. So a while back, a publisher put out a reprint of this original 1840 story.

7:16And here's my favorite review of it that Tori left on Amazon. I don't remember this ending when I was little, but as a mother myself now, I chose to get a refund on this book and not read it to my child. The, quote, ripping off of heads and, quote, tossing the head in one direction and the body in another seems inappropriate to me for a child's book. I think there should be some disclaimer before someone wastes their money or, worse, lets their child read it.

7:52It's not like she's making a ridiculous point, although the history of children's fairy tales is very gory and very gothic. Like the Grimm's fairy tales, for example, I believe, had all sorts of mayhem going on in children, children being murdered and consumed by men and beasts. So, and I think the consensus of modern psychologists is, yeah, that's actually part of the developmental process and it's done kids no harm.

8:23I don't know. I may be inventing that, but that's my notion. Well, I actually, I had to find out for myself because I thought, given that she put some of those words in quotes, she must be exaggerating, right? No. Turns out I got my, I got my hands on a copy of the book and Fox locks, quote, bit off her head, threw it one way and the body the other. And then he does this to each character. But as you intimated, I guess kids were just, I don't know, expected to be tougher in their early 1800s.

8:56We'll see you next time.

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Baseball Context

9:37So I have a theory. There was a Danish language chicken little story from the 1820s predating the English versions. And in that version, the goose was known, and forgive me if my Danish pronunciation is a bit off here, but I believe it was Gossa Possa. And in fact, some of the early English versions borrowed from the Danish one and had the goose, not as goose loose, but as goose pousse or goosey pussy.

10:10But somehow goose loose won out. And I think that it's because to the English speaking ear, goose loose just sounds better. It rolls off the tongue better, right? Maybe it has to do with the fact that loose is an actual common word, or maybe not. Maybe it's just the sounds. And what it makes me think about is when people make a rhyme with my son's name, Xander, they invariably will say Xander Mander.

10:42I even overheard a woman at the supermarket on her cell phone with presumably her grandchild saying, hey, Xander Mander. Xander, Xander, Mo Mander, Banana, Fana, Fofander, Fee, Fai, Mo Mander, Xander. Right. But if you just choose one word, you choose Mander for some reason. And I remember when I was a kid, my grandmother would call me Michaela, which is the Yiddish diminutive for Michael, but Michaela Pykela. And my sister would call me Mikey Pyke sometimes.

11:13So for some reason, the puh sound seemed to want to go with Mikey, like Mander goes with Xander, and I think like loose goes with goose. You mean that some combinations of consonants have a sort of a natural harmony to them that make them the default for rhymes? In a particular language. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So here's my case. I have not found the phrase loose as a goose in any publication from the 1800s.

11:44But what I have found is goose and loose either rhyming with each other in silly poems. You find them in news articles in the same sentence or in consecutive sentences. And you find that over and over again. So here are a few examples. In the late 1800s, you can read about a government representative who carries, quote, no more weight than a loose feather in a goose's tail. You can read about a county fair in the Midwest where some guy is going to jump out of a hot air balloon with a parachute and, quote,

12:18let loose a tame goose. Whoever catches it on the ground gets $5. I wish they still did that. Sounds fun. You can read a poem in old newspapers, a piece of doggerel that goes, John, John, the piper's son stole a pig and away he run. The pig got loose and killed a goose and John was put in the calaboose. So you can read lots of things like that, but not, as far as I could find, the specific phrase loose as a goose until the very early 1900s.

12:55That's when it first shows up. Okay. Well, what was the context? For a few years in the very early 1900s, there was a syndicated comic strip called Wags, The Dog That Adopted a Man. It was about a dog who attached himself to this guy, followed him around everywhere. Only the guy didn't want the dog. He didn't like the dog. He was often trying to get rid of the dog, if you catch my drift, permanently. So in one of these strips from December 1908, the guy ties Wags to a tree.

13:32Again, I guess this was the kind of humor they expected children to like. He says, I'm going to go get my six shooter. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Right. Who is this, Christy Gnome? The guy returns, presumably to kill the dog, and Wags pulls the tree down that he's tied to onto the guy, and the dog says, hello, boss. Wags is as loose as a goose. So this is the very first reference I could find to that phrase, and it meant literally

14:06loose, right? Free. Mm-hmm. Untethered. Not chill, but just no longer restrained. Mm-hmm. Right. But even though this is the very first example, it appears to be an outlier, because something really interesting happens next. Almost all of the examples that I could find now for the next 20, 30 years, first few decades of the 20th century, not all, but most by far, show up in a very specific context.

14:38Yeah. Okay. So you're talking about context. We did an episode about the word angler, and you gave examples of how it showed up quite a number of times in the Bible, because there was a lot of fishing-related narrative in the Bible. Is that what's going on here? There's like one source where it came up again and again? Yes. There's a particular milieu, I guess you would say, where this phrase pops up again and again throughout the early 1900s.

15:11Okay. Collier's Magazine, Women's Home Companion, The Congressional Record, Bazooka Joe? No, I don't think that was there. Go ahead. I have no idea. Okay. So in June of 1910, a baseball writer for the Cincinnati Inquirer wrote about a new pitcher for the Reds, a guy named Rube Benton. This baseball writer was apparently very fond of similes generally, because he called Benton

15:44Green as grass, but as game as gumbo. He then says, Rube Benton is a real rube. No doubt about it. Tall, lanky, loose as a goose with a pleasant smile on his broad face. He is a sample of a Georgian from the mountains. Not only do you see this in a baseball context, Bob, over and over, but you see it in newspapers from all throughout the country. So it's not just one baseball writer doing it.

16:15April 1917, for example, in the Washington Times-Herald here in Washington, D.C., quote, if you fans visit the ballpark early enough, you will see a tall, rangy lad during the team's batting practice. He will be loose as a goose. That writer was talking about an outfielder for the then-Washington Senators named Mike Minoski. 1923, in the Seattle Union record, quote, all trace of soreness and kinks has disappeared

16:46from Harry's arm, and it is now as loose as a goose. This was about the pitcher Harry Krauss. So you see this again and again in writing about baseball back then, and here is what may be a bit of a smoking gun. 1923, the New York Herald, talking about future Hall of Fame pitcher, Waite Hoyt. At that time, he was on the Yankees. He played for a bunch of different teams. Quote, Hoyt has grown heavy and big.

17:19He scales at 186 pounds and looks every inch a pitcher. In the parlance of the ballplayers, he is as loose as a goose. So clearly, this had been a long-standing idiom within baseball to mean, you can tell by all of those examples, some combination of relaxed and limber, I would say. Neither of which qualities you would associate with an actual goose.

17:49Right. I found an article from the Wichita Eagle in 1927 that refers to loose as a goose specifically as, quote, a baseball expression. Oh. Again, yeah, indicating that this was something that existed within the sport. I also found a reference in the Asheville Times from 1928 to a pitcher's arm being, quote, loose as a goose's neck, which arguably gives more sense to the expression.

18:22So it's tempting to think that this all began with baseball. And that may be true, right? At the very least, it seems that baseball players and baseball writers popularized the expression. And their patois just kind of leaked into the public at large, thanks to sports writers at large circulation daily newspapers around the country. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, it did become a bit of a general sports cliche. I found... Oh, I said patois. It should have been paté-ois.

18:53Yes. Nice. That's a nice goose pun. I did, in fact, find references more generally in other sports. There, people used it in the 1920s and 30s to refer to basketball players and to track and field athletes. It became a kind of cliche on the sports page. If you can imagine that. Right. Yeah. So there are now a couple of more examples that I think are worth mentioning because of what the phrase is used to mean in those examples.

19:27In other words, it's not relaxed or limber like the ballplayers or like in this clip from Seinfeld. Say you got a big job interview and you're a little nervous? Well, throw back a couple of shots of Hennigan's and you'll be as loose as a goose and ready to roll in no time. And it's not used to mean free or unconstrained like Wags the Dog or like in this clip from The Dukes of Hazzard. Hey, listen, y'all, y'all want to join us for a pit stop? Can't right now, Wolfman, but we're loose as a goose for lunch.

19:59These are different meanings entirely. Number one, in December of 1915, a guy named Edward Hogue rang a fire alarm from one of those call boxes on the street that were very common before there were phones everywhere and you still see them in cities. This was in Richmond, California, outside of San Francisco. And when the fire truck arrived, Mr. Hogue admitted that there was no fire, that he had

20:30rung the alarm because he wanted a photograph with the firemen. A reporter for the Martinez Daily Standard was there and wrote in the newspaper, quote, loose as a goose, remarked one of the firemen with a wink as he pointed to Mr. Hogue's head. So the fireman was using it to suggest that Hogue was insane, that he had a screw loose, as we would say now. A screw loose, right, yes. By the way, subject of expressions that don't really necessarily scan but are associated with

21:08questioning somebody's sanity, my wife, talking about someone who's extremely erratic, will say, she's a Serb, so it's a Serbian expression, he's crazy like a wall.

21:23Wait, did you say a wall, like W-A-L-L? A wall. Yeah, crazy like a wall. Maybe he's also hungry like a paintbrush. He's clumsy like a lake. Crazy like a wall. How does that scan in Serbian? Does it rhyme? I'm glad you asked. It does not. In Serbian, it's ludia causid, which, you know, it doesn't rhyme, it isn't alliterative, it's just cognitive dissonance. Crazy.

21:54There's got to be a story behind that, right? Crazy like the guy who has bodies buried behind his wall, like what? It can't possibly exist for no reason. Yeah, hey, also, that's verging on a slur, because to my understanding, no more than 20% of the Serbian population has a body secreted behind a wall. Right. Most of them have them under their floorboards. You're right.

22:22Okay. It's Europeans. Go figure. So there's one more example I want to mention, again, with an entirely different meaning. This one resonates with something that you said earlier in the show, Bob. So in the early 1900s, there were a couple of folklorists. Randolph and Wilson were their last names. They studied the dialect of rural communities, specifically around the Ozark Mountains. And in 1953, they published a book of their findings called Down in the Holler.

22:57And one of the phrases they document is the phrase, loose as a goose, which, as they put it, quote, refers to diarrhea, which made me think of this famous speech from the movie Patton. We are advancing constantly, and we're not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy. We're going to hold on to him by the nose, and we're going to kick him in the ass. We're going to kick the hell out of him all the time, and we're going to go through him like crap through a goose.

23:29Like crap through a goose. Yeah, geese are notoriously loose-boweled, as you pointed out, Bob. They poop everywhere. And appropriately, goose poop is a known carrier of E. coli and salmonella. That's why I always, always, always boil my goose stool. It's just, you don't want to fool around with those bacteria.

24:00I mean, the guidelines, ever since the Surgeon General put out those guidelines, if you don't do that, you're crazy. You're crazy, like... Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Who is as wise as an owl, as graceful as a swan, and as cunning as a fox. Please visit us at booksmartstudios.com to leave a comment and to become a paid subscriber.

24:36She is tenacious as a bulldog, but as gentle as a lamb. Say hello on X, Facebook, Blue Sky. We are at Lexicon Valley everywhere. You know what, Mike? You have convinced me animal expressions that exist only because they rhyme are ridiculous. Are we done here? Yeah, we are done. In that case, later, gator. Some follow the noise.

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