Goose egg

In any competition, if you don't score any goals and finish with a zero then you have a goose egg. Originally the term comes from cricket.
There’s not much to smile about when you got nothing.

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WotD: Goose egg

No one wants to end with a goose egg, whether we’re talking about the game of life or a sports event.

No one wants to finish anything with a big fat zero.

Imagine playing a soccer game and not scoring.

I mean, wouldn’t it feel like a waste of time to run and run and run and not achieve even one goal?

I suggest you’d feel like you deserved to lose.

Saying that someone or a team got nothing but a goose egg sounds humiliating.

In the game of life, most people want to leave their mark.

They want to leave some legacy for the next generation to remember them by.

If you are a business person, it could be your business, or if you are a philanthropist, you may live on in the memory of the many people who benefitted from your help.

But a goose egg?

Heck, even a goose farmer wants to leave behind more than one of those things.

What the heck can you do with one egg?

If it were a golden egg from The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, then it would be a different story, but one egg and a lousy old goose egg at that.

Nobody wants to leave that behind.

From my research, I’ve learned that the term goose egg originally came from the game of cricket.

In cricket, when you have a score of 0, it looks like an egg, so they started calling it a goose egg.

Now, why do they use goose, not chicken, duck, or grouse eggs?

I have no idea.

Often English terms had a logical explanation once, but they have since been lost to history.

Only the term itself has been passed down through history, not the logic behind it.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).  

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 82.  

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.



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