What was said? “When you look at the program results, all you see is “goose egg, goose egg, goose egg!”

Did someone really say that? Yes, last week when discussing how many program incentives a customer is claiming.

What does it mean? It means a big ZERO! Zilch, zip, nada.

Origin: Throughout my search, it seems that the majority of “goose egg” references is in the world of sports. Referencing a scoreboard and seeing the number zero that has a similar “look” as a round, elongated egg of a goose. Sample scoreboard references: “The home team got a big goose egg on the scoreboard,” or “At the end of the game there was nothing but goose eggs next to our name,” and even used as a verb sometimes “I played a tennis match and was goosegged, I lost 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.” Some believe that the term is an Americanization of the British term “duck’s egg” and that even that originated through sports – in 1870, in a game of cricket, a “duck’s egg” denoted a score of zero; and around the same time in baseball, the “goose egg” reference came alive. In tennis, a score of zero is known as “Love” in the USA, which “sounds” like the original French term for the score “l’ouef” which means… you guessed it – an egg!

To lay an egg is another expression that also means to flop, fail and to not score and apparently has no connection to a hen/goose/duck actually laying an egg. So in summary, not scoring is to “lay an egg” with a resulting “goose egg” on the scoreboard simply because the Arabic numeral “0” zero resembles an egg. Super scientific!

Sources:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goose+egg
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/goose+egg
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5516/origin-and-meaning-of-lay-an-egg
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lay+an+egg

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