David Takes a Gander at Geese

Not two days ago, your young, captivating hero joined with his fellow Berlinsketeers Alex Calta and Jenn Smith on what spontaneously became a walking tour of our nation's capital. Somewhere along the National Mall, we encountered a particularly patriotic group of waterfowl plying their trade upon the banks of a reflecting pool. Yet just as we were about to give them the old "Howdy, partner," tip our Stetsons and ride on past them to Mama O'Grady's General Store with the sun to our backs, they started acting suspicious. They smiled toothlessly at us; they punctuated every thought with a single repetitive sound; they were spooked by our concealed, unregistered firearms; they administered health care to one other in a sickeningly egalitarian manner. That's right. These were Canadian geese.

What say you and your anchor goslings learn some goddamn English, eh?

Anyways, since we'd already passed the responsibility of determining an individual's right to exist in this country based solely on stereotyped profiling on to the officers of Arizona's state-level law enforcement division, we moved on to other more pressing concerns: namely, what one calls a group of Canadian geese. Other than "socialists," of course. We considered the merits of each of the following options, among others that escape my memory:

• A herd of geese
• A goose colony
• A pride of geese
• A phalanx of geese
• A pack of wild geese
• A wild goose chase
• Pillows (pre-production)

Pillows (post-production).

• A heap of geese
• A goose bump
• A whole heapin' pile of geese
• A peck of geese
• A murder MOST FOWL

We just couldn't seem to hit the nail on the head. Anywho, we continued on our merry way, and the entire episode flew from my mind like a contubernium of geese.

UNTIL:
Fast forward to the next day when, whilst looking up the number of spots on Barney the dinosaur (answer: 8) on GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia, I find myself linked to, of all pages, the article on Mother Goose. Scrolling through this page, as is my wont, I encounter the following poem, which is not only written by, but is also about Mother Goose:

     Old Mother Goose
     When she wanted to wander,
     Would ride through the air 
     On a very fine gander.

     Jack's mother came in
     And caught the goose soon,
     And mounting its back,
     Flew up to the moon.

Now, I had the first thought here we all did: Hey, Jack's mom, that's a pretty shoddy parenting job, neglecting Jack to go play goostronaut; also, you might want to double-check and make sure you didn't just commit a goose-murder-suicide.

But look back up there, and you'll have the same second thought I had as well: notice the word "gander." THAT'S IT. That has to be it. A gander of geese. How could we have forgotten gander? "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." What's good for one goose is good for all the geese of his ilk. What's good for you is good for yourn. Everyone knows that. Upon realizing such an obvious lexical oversight, I entered an emotionally heightened state wherein I was too excited with scientific/idiomatic discovery to actually check what a "gander" might be, and hastily scribbled on Jenn's Facebook page the following:

Well, joke's on me, because a "gander" is not a group of geese whatsoever. A gander is just a male goose. A group of geese, for those still wondering, is known as a gaggle of geese when said geese are grounded or asea, but once such geese transcend this terrestrial coil and reach cruising altitude, they become a skein, according to GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia. 

Which ultimately evolves at Level 36 into a shitplague of geese.

My research shows that a simple "flock" would work as well, but that's just for fools. Interestingly, "fool" apparently fits a second definition of "gander."

If you're anything like me, and you are everything like me, the idea of "gander" as plain old Mr. Goose is anything but satisfactory. It begs the question: What precisely does the idiom "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" mean? Does it mean "What's good for the goose of indeterminate gender is good, too, for the male goose"? Because that is much more difficult to apply to humans than what I thought it meant. And it certainly has no bearing on a group of female humans ("humanesses," the science calls them).

We now have a mystery on our hands, folks. I turned to the various Internets and posed my query on the Googling machine. The Internet horde replied: it apparently understands the idiomatic expression as a pre-industrial cry for the equality of the womenfolk. To these Mongol rubes, the phrase means "that which benefits the humaness is that which benefits the huMAN." This interpretation is honestly all over the fucking Interwebs. Be not fooled, ye faithful minions, nor be ye deceived by the fumbling keystrokes of these witless ganders. For to find this answer, we must delve into the darkest depths of the Internet, boldly going where no man has gone before: the second page of the Google search.

What, no, that's just nonsense. Sorry if I made anyone nervous there. No, seriously, you can come back from cowering in the corner. We're just going back to GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia. Stop trying to set your computer aflame. We'll get through this; that was really immature of me. There is no second page of a Google search.

MOVING ON:
Returning to the GALACTIC LEXICOGRAPHIC COMPENDIUM Wiktionary definition of "gander," we see underneath the word's definitions the terms derived from that word under the cryptic heading "derived terms." And here we see our fatal mistake: the phrase "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" is merely a corrupted form of the original idiom, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."

"Gosling? More like 'sauce-ling'! They're talking about the sauces we eat, right? Those humans?"

Further investigation (i.e., clicking the GALACTIC LEXICOGRAPHIC COMPENDIUM Wiktionary link) shows that the sentiment conveyed in the idiom is absolutely not a rudimentary peasant expression of the ideal of the equality of the sexes. Rather, the sole definition is precisely what I had always believed it to be: "If something is acceptable for one person then it is acceptable for another."

Still, since the idiom meant what I thought it meant, we're left with the same problem. To say what it actually says, the saying should go: "What's good for the goose is good for the gaggle," or "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gaggle." Although that last one unfortunately carries some connotations of goose-genocide (which was, apparently, a thing?), no ganders need be included to muddle this whole thing up with post-modern feminist notions to begin with. And if we don't want to bring up horrible memories of the Goose-ocaust, we could just say: "What's sauce for this goose, Goose A, similarly serves as sauce for that goose, Goose B." Finally, I've found what I've been searching for for all these years: idiomatic clarity.

Pictured: a thing. Goddammit. 

Now, since we've already shown that you and I are practically the same person, I don't have to tell you, adoring reader, that there's a second mystery here which should be bugging you, weighing down, in fact, upon your very soul. Don't you fret, because we're covering that next. No, you are certainly not done with this blog post, get back here, young lady. So let's just get it out in the open: "What, pray tell, is a 'peck,' if not a unit of goose?" you ask in despair, hoping against all hope that I might provide your salvation. Well sit right on back and put your sexy-time reading shoes on, because I'm about to knowledge you up something fierce.

We'll begin this discussion where we began the last one: children's rhymes and idiomatic expression. We know that a "peck" can at least describe some measurement of pickled peppers, yet even our very source leaves unanswered the question: "How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?" We don't know; but we know he picked a peck. That is a fact, and it is undisputed.

Once children's rhymes and idiomatic expressions have inevitably failed us as researchers, we must move on to the next best option: GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia. According to the peck-based article, a peck is a customary unit of dry volume. In fact, it amounts to a quarter of a bushel. For those of you unversed in the measures of dry volume, that's half a kenning. So Peter Piper knocked out 2 dry gallons of pickled peppers, is what I'm saying.

This definition is actually good news for our goose-related endeavors. It is technically possible to obtain a peck of geese. All we have to do is find out how many geese make 2 dry gallons worth of goose. But therein lies the rub. I might be just taking what I learned in 7th grade and trying to apply it to the world outside of middle school, but I recall that taking the volume of any irregularly shaped object, as some consider the common goose, is best done by determining its water displacement, or the amount of water it displaces when it is completely submerged. So even dry volume gets a little wet. Unfortunately for us scientists, all empirical evidence attests to the goose's renowned buoyancy.

Quick! Hold him under!

Since measuring the dry volume of waterfowl via water displacement technically falls under PETA's definition of "drowning animals," we're going to have to come up with another means of figuring out just how much three-dimensional space one goose encloses. As luck would have it, a Google image search reveals that apparently they make baskets that hold varying denominations of peck. 

Front row, far right: one peck. 

So yeah, what, like, goose, goose-and-a-half?