[PW] question: legal expression, proverb, etc. "gets the grease from the goose"

[John P. Dyson]

Quoting David Rash <drash at everettcc.edu>:

> A faculty member is looking for the origin of a phrase which shows up in
> several legal cases: "gets the grease from the goose".  The context
> seems to indicate self generation or self incrimination but I could be
> wrong about this.  We have tried standard quote, proverb, slang
> dictionaries, Biblical concordance, concordance to Shakespeare, legal
> dictionaries, Dictionary of American Regional English, Idioms and
> Phrases Index, OED, Oxford Online databases, Historic NYT, etc. all to
> no avail. Please  Help!


As anyone who has ever baked a goose will tell you, the only way to get 
to the goose proper is to render out its grease. Getting the grease 
from the goose would therefore mean getting to the heart of the matter 
or issue at hand. This expression seems to have been used by only one 
circuit judge, the Honorable Bruce M. Selya of Rhode Island. You could 
check my rendition of this saying by checking with him. I don't believe 
goose grease ever had a particular occurrence in proverbs, although its 
Latin name _adeps anseris_ is found in old pharmacopias as an 
ingredient in purgatives or clysters. And "goose grease" is what older 
wags in the 1950s called the pomades used by teens in imitation of the 
Elvis look (as in the musical, _Grease_).

John Dyson
Spanish and Portuguese
Indiana University