to cook someone's goose
- idiom
- Informal
:
arruinarle los planes a alguien
- His reckless decisions in the meeting really cooked his goose and jeopardized his promotion.
Examples
-
If you ignore the warning signs, you might just cook your goose and ruin your future plans.
-
That would have cooked your goose.
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If they ever cook your goose Turn me loose
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You cooked your goose, Eddie.
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Nobody cooked County's goose except Johnny... ...the way he shot off his mouth.
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You sure cooked County's goose, Mr. Cross... ...when you testified you couldn't paint.
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You better be careful; if you keep making mistakes, you'll cook your goose with the boss.
Synonyms
To ruin their chances of success
To ruin someone's plans by making them fail or change suddenly
To spoil someone's plans so they cannot succeed
Antonyms
How Ruined
- Informal
557
1.7
∞
2.0
- Informal
80
2.8
270
6.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
The overall meaning 'to ruin someone's plans or chances' cannot be derived from the literal constituents 'cook' (prepare food) + 'goose' (a bird); the action of cooking a goose does not transparently map onto harming someone's prospects. This is a conventionalized idiom whose sense is language-specific and unpredictable, so learners who only know the component words will not reliably infer the meaning without prior exposure.
Etymology
Cook someone's goose may come from a simple image: once you cook a goose for a meal, the bird is finished and cannot be saved. So the phrase now means 'to ruin someone's plans or chances'.