Goody’s Moose

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike from St. Augustine, Florida.

Hi, Mike, right there on the coast. Welcome.

Hi, Mike, how are you doing?

Hey, I’m doing well, thanks.

What can we help you with?

I have a phrase used by my mother-in-law.

She’s from Lake City, Florida, which is up kind of north and central in Florida.

And she will often say something to the effect of, for instance, if you were driving to her house

And you lived two hours away and you got there an hour and a half, she’d say,

Man, you got here quicker than Goody’s Moose.

And so my question to y’all is, what is Goody’s Moose?

You got here quicker than Goody’s Moose?

How do you spell Goody?

You know, it would have to be phonetic, but I would imagine kind of like G-O-O-D-Y or G-U with an umlaut.

Goody’s Moose.

So it looks like Goody’s, but it rhymes with moose.

That’s how I picture it.

Oh, this is interesting.

So she’s American.

There anything unusual about her background or her language or anything at all? Nothing unusual,

But like I said, she’s from Lake City. At least when she was growing up, it was kind of a very

Rural town. And I asked her kind of where she picked it up, and she just said from her childhood.

Like it wasn’t something her dad said necessarily, or maybe it was, but she doesn’t really know.

And so, you know, she doesn’t really have a clear line of where she learned it.

This is a transposed version of the older version, which is Moody’s Goose.

The one that most people say is Moody’s or have said is Moody’s Goose.

M-O-O-D apostrophe S-G-O-O-S-E, Moody’s Goose.

And what you would say is faster than Moody’s Goose or flew in like Moody’s Goose or ran off like Moody’s Goose,

Indicating speed and haste.

Like you’re not only moving fast, but you’re like a blur on the horizon.

But who was Moody and what was his goose doing?

Well, there’s another interesting happening here.

That’s not even the oldest form of it.

The oldest form of it is Mooney’s goose, M-O-O-N-E-Y apostrophe S.

Oh, really?

And so if you do some digging on Mooney’s goose, you’re going to find it from 200 years ago in places like a collection of Irish proverbs from 1813.

Whoa.

Where the expression is, and I’ll read this to you, full of fun and fooster like Mooney’s goose.

Now, fooster is a word that you don’t know, and it’s really hard to look up.

But it turns out, if you look in the English dialect dictionary, it means full of bustling or fuss.

So full of fun and fuss, basically, is what you’re saying in there.

So kind of active and lively and that sort of thing, like a lot of energy on display, right?

And so what we have here is a 200-year-old expression that’s kind of been modified at least twice.

Went from Mooney’s goose to Moody’s goose to Goody’s moose.

That’s fantastic.

Yeah, it’s fantastic, right?

But we don’t know who Mooney or Moody were.

We have no idea.

I’d love to think that there’s some great folklore character named Mooney out there who had, like, a remarkable goose about which people told tales.

But I don’t have any evidence of it.

Well, that is interesting.

So originally, or at least as far back as you can tell, it was Irish in origin.

Yes, and it comes up again and again in Irish collections of proverbs and folklore and that sort of thing.

And it’s not really until the early 1900s that it begins to transform and is almost always Moody’s goose.

And frankly, Goody’s moose is really hard to find.

It’s almost never used, at least it’s not in the historical record as far as I can tell.

Well, next time I’m in Lake City, I will ask the family, anybody else uses it, if they have any memory of where it came from.

Yeah, like a grandparent or a great aunt or like some well-known, you know, joke-telling, storytelling neighbor, that sort of thing.

Yeah, radio show.

Yeah.

Right.

Thanks, Mike, for the call.

We’ll do it.

Let us know what she says, all right?

Thanks for the information.

Sure, take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, guys. Love your show.

Bye.

Thanks, you.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

This collection of Irish proverbs is really rich, but one of the best ones in the whole book,

And I’m not quite sure what it means, but it is,

His eyes are like two burnt holes in a blanket.

Whoa!

I assume that it means you’re really tired and you have circles under your eye.

Whoa, what an image.

His eyes are like two burnt holes in a blanket.

Oh, he needs some rest.

So, white complexion, but, yeah, bags under your eyes, dark circles.

That is vivid.

You don’t ever want to be that tired or that hungover, right?

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