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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Just found this today (in an email)
The only way for this to come to a halt is for the investors to go to annual meetings and vote them down, but few can do that. The executives of the biggest investors, (insurance companies, etc.) do the same things, so why would they want to knock down the golden egg?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Very cute. The usual cliche is, of course, “kill the goose (that lays the golden eggs).” And although it’s not very common, hunters sometimes say they “knock down” geese and other fowl when they shoot them out of the sky. I don’t think “knock down the golden egg” comes from that latter expression though – fighting seems a more likely source. Or it may even be “cause to move down by knocking, criticizing,” with no reference to any cliche.
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Yeah. I thought first of “don’t knock it (till you try it)†as the source (with killing the goose) for the blend. But “knocking down†from fighting or from demolishing a building or other structure is, as you note, a more probable source.
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A few other golden goosey phrases:
You’re always trying to kill the goose that lays the fatted egg.
That controls guy screwed the golden goat
Throwing the goose out with the bath water.
the goose that killed the golden eggs
Don’t kill the golden goose!
That last one is standard for a lot of people, apparently. (Thousands of ghits.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-02-05 20:44:17)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
That controls guy screwed the golden goat
The phrase “golden goat” immediately reminded me of the song of the same name by the late, great Snakefinger. Googling yielded over 300 unique hits, most of which referred to a popular strain of marijuana. There were a number of other usages. None of the ones I noticed looked accidental or eggcornish. The Google Ngram Viewer shows the phrase starting in the 1850s and peaking sharply in the 1920s. It’s clearly a phrase that really means something to quite a few people, though the meanings are different depending on who you ask.
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