cook your goose

your goose is cooked

If you cook your goose, you do something which gets you into trouble or spoils your chances of success. You can also cook someone else's goose.

By trying to nick my he cooked his goose. After that I just had to

There was another possibility; that somehow they had been able to check up on me and had discovered my false history. That, I was sure, would me in the shoemaker class and effectively cook my goose.

If you are in trouble or will certainly fail at something, you can say that your goose is cooked.

I fully expected we would be attacked by ground forces. We all felt that our goose was you know, there were just--not much you could do--is take as many of them as you could with you, you There was absolutely no way to retreat.

kill the goose that lays the golden egg

kill the golden goose

If something kills the goose that lays the golden egg or kills the golden goose, it results in an important source of income being destroyed or seriously reduced.

Most professionals in the travel and tourism if those this writer has spoken to are a guide, would not object to tougher regulation of what tourists can do, when and how. know than that unregulated tourism can kill the goose that laid their golden egg.

Few councils would today risk killing the golden goose by levying too onerous a local tax.

You can refer to an important source of income as a golden goose, especially when it is in danger of being destroyed or seriously reduced.

It was alleged in court that Hewitt treated Whittaker as a `golden goose'.

No one can be sure that the golden goose of manufacturing industry hasn't been so badly battered during the past decade that it is incapable of delivering the revenues to which we have become accustomed.

a wild goose chase

If you complain that you have been sent on a wild goose chase, you are complaining that you have wasted a lot of time searching for something that you have little chance of finding, because you have been given misleading information.

If he wasted police time, and thus police money, on a wild goose when a perfectly adequate and chargeable suspect was , his superiors would take a dim view.

Every time I've gone to Rome to try to find out if the story could be true, it has turned out to be a wild-goose chase.

wouldn't say boo to a goose    

If you say that someone wouldn't say boo to a goose, you mean that they are very timid, gentle, and shy.

`If you remember, at college I wouldn't say boo to a goose.' `That's right, you were very quiet.'

She would fall into that category of people who tend the sick and visit the old, never saying boo to a goose.