To ruin someone’s undertaking or plan. There are numerous colorful theories about the origin of this term. According to one, the inhabitants of a besieged town in the sixteenth century hung out a goose to show their attackers they were not starving; the enraged enemies then set fire to the town and thus cooked the goose. According to another, the term comes from the fable about the goose that laid golden eggs, which, when the farmer killed it to obtain the gold inside, left him with nothing but a goose to cook. The earliest written records of the term date from the mid-nineteenth century, one being in a street ballad opposing the Pope’s appointment of a particular cardinal (“If they’ll come here we’ll cook their goose, the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman,” 1851).