Duck Duck ... Chicken?

[Chris Waigl]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009 23:25:31 -0500, Victor <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
> I've mentioned before that I am easily surprised by colloquial
> expressions that might not phase others.

You already commented on "phase" yourself.

> [...]
> An interesting twist in English football today. Chelsea sacked its its
> rather prominent coach (manager) and there were some speculations that
> Guus Hiddink, who has been coaching the Russian national team, might be
> hired to replace him. Hiddink's agent, Cees van Newenhausen, observed
> that the chances of Hiddink changing jobs are slim. But he added an
> extra flair.
>
>
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/09022009/58/premier-league-chance-hiddink-chelsea.html
> "He is doing pretty well with Russia and wants to get to the World Cup
> in South Africa for the fourth time in a row, with a fourth different
> team.
> "He's currently at a training camp in Turkey and I think (Chelsea owner)
> Roman Abramovich would not make too many friends in Russia if he were
> _to steal a goose away_ from the national team. I can hardly imagine it."
>
>
> A search for "steal a/the goose away" revealed fewer than 10 hits, all
> but one referring to the quote.  Even changing to "steal a/the goose
> from" did not improve the situation--these mostly refer to stealing an
> actual goose or to a line from an 200+ year old rhyme. (The law condemns
> the man and woman : Who steal a goose from off the common ; But let the
> greater villain loose: To steal the common from the goose.--By the way,
> in what dialect does that rhyme?)
>
> One commenter observed
>
> http://au.fourfourtwo.com/forums/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=11610
> Steal a goose? Is that an old Russian saying or did he actually say
> 'steal Guus' and somebody used their spell check in Office a bit too
> vigorously?
>
>
> Is this guy on to something?
>
> Here's where this gets bizarre. I thought that this was some idiomatic
> Dutch or Flemish expression. But my Dutch is not sufficient--certainly
> not enough to catch some idiomatic nuance. So I ran Google translator on
> "trying to steal a goose away from them". The translation appeared
> rather quickly, "proberen te stelen van een kip uit de buurt van hen".
> There is only one problem--there is a "kip" (chicken) where I expected
> "gans" (goose). (Plus, of course, there is no guarantee that the
> translation is anywhere near accurate--and, as I mentioned, my Dutch is
> simply not good enough.) So, it appears that there might be an
> expression in Dutch, but... it does not involve "goose". Swedish, French
> and German don't have this problem.
>
> The question remains, where did this "goose" come from? Is there some
> proverbial "goose" in some Flemish dialect or perhaps in German? Or is
> the lone comment correct and someone just screwed up "Guus" and then
> added the article to fix the "grammar"? At the moment, I am inclined to
> go with the latter. Besides, it's the more intriguing possibility.
>
> And I am also wondering how that "kip" crept into the Dutch translation.
> Is this a real Dutch expression or did Google just screw up in a very
> odd way?

Well, for the English it may be an awkward pun, or an obscure saying, maybe
influenced by "the goose that lays golden eggs". But I'd personally guess
at a transcription/comprehension error: He may have said "to steal Guus
away from them", and the journalist or transcriber parsed it as "goose" and
inserted an article to make it grammatical. This can happen quite
inadvertently -- they may be convinced they heared "a goose".

For the Dutch, I have a number of Dutch speakers in my Twitter cloud
(flock?), so I tweeted it and immediately got three replies back: One said
"not a saying", two said "maybe regional" (one wrote "never heard of it.
but they have some weird sayings in some rural parts of the country"), and
none had ever heard of it.

As for Google, I ran "the goose that lays golden eggs" through Goolge
Translate, and it came up with "de kip met gouden eieren". There you've got
your chicken... maybe it identified it as an idiom?

Cheers,

Chris Waigl

--
http://chryss.eu  Twitter: chrys

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org