‘Goosey, goosey gander,’ my husband shouted at the television, like someone from Gogglebox. It’s not so much that he thinks the television real as that he thinks himself an unreal part of the television.
The cause of his outburst was something that had caught my attention, too. Someone had said: ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.’ We both thought this a mere garbling of the proverb: ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ It is not the benefit of either the goose or the gander that is under consideration but the delectation of their flesh. Certainly, the oldest books of proverbs mention sauce.
Chief among these is John Ray’s collection from 1670. What a labour it must have been to compile. But Ray was fearless, taking a mere three weeks to categorise all the animals and plants of the world, as a contribution to John Wilkins’s universal language.
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