Goose/The Finger

[Mark A Mandel]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, James A. Landau wrote:

#In my own experience, "goose" has always meant to poke someone in the
#buttocks.  cf the spoonerism "Will John goose Sadie's cook?"

<pedant>That's a metathesis, but not a spoonerism. A spoonerism is a
metathesis at the phoneme or syllable level, usually between two words:
"May I sew you to another sheet?" (show...seat). This metathesis
exchanges two words intact.</pedant>

#Aside to Mark Mandel---the abbreviation "so." is ambiguous, because it could
#mean either "someone" or "something".

Urk. Right you are. I was thinking of SomeOne, but of course there's
another 'o' in there. I shoulda used "smn." or "smb.".

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large