cooked goose

[raffavita]

Hello,


I'm having problems with this expression. An American woman is chasing a killer and tells a Frenchman: "If he realizes that I'm following him, I'll be a cooked goose, or whatever the say is."

I have the feeling that she's misusing a French say.

Does it remind you of something?

Is there any French say implying that a person is in real danger??

Thank you so much in advance.
Raffuzza

 

[Angle O'Phial]

my goose is cooked is a pretty standard English idiom...

 

[doinel]

On peut dire Je suis cuit(e) ou fait(e) comme un rat
dans le sens je suis fichu(e) mais je ne vois pas quoi faire de l'oie....

 

[watergirl]

As Angle O. points out, saying your "goose is cooked" is fairly common.
However, the speaker's use of it here is different, and fairly comical.
We don't normally refer to ourselves as a "cooked goose" even though we say "my goose is cooked" -- if you see the difference.
(That is why the speaker follows up with, "whatever the saying is..." because it has come out wrong -- culinary even!)

 

[raffavita]

Hmm, I know the English expression, but since she's speaking to a French man in her poor French, I wondered if she was using a French equivalent for "cooked goose". The reader is never told when she's speaking French. You have to deduce it from the context. Her French is immediately translated into English.

Why should she be uncertain as to what the English expression sounds like? That's why I assumed she was speaking French.

That's weird.
A similar thing occurred when she used the expression "camel's breath" and her interlocutor corrected it with "hair's breadth" (she was referring to a narrow escaped she experienced). The text is in English, but they were speaking French and she made a mistake. She must have misspelled a French expression, because "camel's breadth" is not commonly used in English.
However, I still have to figure out what the expression sounded like in French.
The same here.
Thank you very much indeed.

 

[Angle O'Phial]

Sorry, now I'm confused. The text, in English, is of an American speaking to a Frenchman in broken French, and you're trying to reconstruct, from the English text, what she said in French? If so, I'm sure she said something like:

Je serai une oie cuite, ou quoi que l'on dise

with a semi-literal translation of the English idiom into French.

 

[raffavita]

As Angle O. points out, saying your "goose is cooked" is fairly common.
However, the speaker's use of it here is different, and fairly comical.
We don't normally refer to ourselves as a "cooked goose" even though we say "my goose is cooked" -- if you see the difference.
(That is why the speaker follows up with, "whatever the saying is..." because it has come out wrong -- culinary even!)

Exactly! What really puzzles me is her misuse of an English term she should know perfectly. She is the American one.

Since the (American) could not write the whole novel in French, she wrote it in English, but I'm pretty sure this kind of misuses implies they're speaking French, actually, and the woman is making mistakes.

I think it's the other way around. She is deliberately writing "cooked goose" as a bad translation of a French expression.

 

[doinel]

Quite puzzling!!!!
I can't think of any say in French like cooked goose????
Sorry I can't help.

 

[raffavita]

Thank you so much, guys!
It's a tough one!