Origin Stories: Silly Goose

Geese at Lamoine State Park, ME

I was driving along Maine’s Downeast a couple weeks ago and made a stop at Lamoine State Park, a park I visited many times as a child. As I made to pull into the parking lot, I was forced to stop to let a flock of geese take their sweet time crossing the road. They weren’t the first flock I had seen that day, as it is their migration season, and yet, looking at the many geese whom I begged to move out of my way, I realized that their presence on Maine’s roads is as abundant as their presence in the English expressions.

I’ve been taking a gander at the Halloween decorations in stores, and the last time I played tennis, I scored a big ol’ goose egg, but most notably, every time I censor myself when referring to someone doing something stupid, I call them a silly goose.

The origin of “Silly Goose” is thought to go back to the late 16th century, when the first documented use of it was seen in The Paradise of Dainty Devices by poet Richard Edwards. The line reads: “She crafty Foxe, the seely Goose beguiles.” The line is less about the goose and more about the craftiness of the sly fox, its predator, capable of outwitting and fooling its prey. Yet hunters as recent as the 1930s believed geese were dumb prey, afterall, the geese in front of me lazily waddled around the road as a vehicle weighing over a ton inched closer to them.

But this is a proven myth. Efforts to reduce the snow geese population in the 30s by 10% were foiled by an underlying survival instinct that was not inherently obvious in the birds, forcing extensions to the hunting season.

Even in fables that were produced after Edwards’ initial line, geese have been known to symbolize gullible creatures and prey. “The Fox and the Geese” is an 1812 fairy tale by The Grimm brothers (the very same authors who wrote the original Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood). The story depicts the geese as easy prey for the fox, and yet, its open ending suggests what those hunters realized nearly a hundred years ago: geese stubbornly live on.

Despite their depictions and humanity’s assumptions about geese being foolish prey, Edwards’ line continues to have an etymological distinction: the goose is “seely” not “silly.” This is not a huge distinction, as Old English words were commonly spelled differently than we might spell them today, but it does speak to the greater phenomenon of how words change meaning over time. Some believe that the word “seely” was more closely defined to “simple-minded” and later “foolish.” This explains nicely why a “silly goose” might only be funny in the fact that they are dumb. 

Although I have never found myself laughing at a goose in the wild, I must admit that part of me thinks them to be a bit simple-minded, while I wait for them to move out from in front of my car.