verb (colloquial).—1. To tamper with, garble, or falsify. Accounts are COOKED when so altered as to look better than they are. Pictures are COOKED when dodged-up for sale. Painters say that a picture will not COOK when it is so excellent as to be beyond imitation.
1751. SMOLLETT, Peregrine Pickle, ch. xcviii. Some falsified printed accounts, artfully COOKED up, on purpose to mislead and deceive.
1856. Punch, vol. XXXI., p. 189. ‘Advertisement of Bubble Bank Bookkeeping,’ by Prof. McDooall. It is remarkable especially for the facilities it offers for COOKING the accounts, as it entirely prevents any possibility of checking them.
1863. C. READE, Hard Cash, II., p. 19. When A. has been looking up to B. for thirty years, he cannot look down on him all of a sudden, merely because he catches him falsifying accounts. Why, Man is a COOKING animal: bankrupt Man especially.
1871. The Athenæum, 4 Feb. The great work of art of Ivan Turgeneff, the Notes by a Sportsman had been what is vulgarly called COOKED for the French markets.
1872. SPENCER, The Study of Sociology, ch. vi., p. 119 (9 ed.). The dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen and manufacturers … in COOKING of railway accounts and financial prospectuses.
1888. GRANT ALLEN, This Mortal Coil, ch. v. Where Warren Relf was seated COOKING a sky in one of his hasty seaside sketches.
1890. The Saturday Review, 1 Feb., p. 134, col. 1. We referred, in our last article upon this [gambling] subject, to the Paris Mutuels, and explained their working. Now money has to be found somehow for the poorer classes to get to the Mutuel and back their fancies, and the clerk COOKS his books, and the shop-boy ‘fingers the till.’
2. See COOK ONE’S GOOSE, of which it is an abbreviation.
3. (colloquial).—To swelter with heat and sweat. In this sense the Fourbesque has ansare; literally ‘to be out of breath.’
TO COOK ONE’S GOOSE, verbal phr. (common).—To ‘settle’; ‘worst’; kill; or ruin.
ENGLISH SYNONYMS. To anodyne; to put to bed; to snuff out; to give, or cook one’s gruel; to corpse; to cooper up; to wipe out; to spiflicate; to settle, or settle one’s hash; to squash; to shut up; to send to pot; to smash; to finish; to do for; to bugger up; to put one’s light out; to stop one’s little game; to stop one’s galloping; to put on an extinguisher; to clap a stopper on; to bottle up; to squelch; to play hell (or buggery) with; to rot; to squash up; to stash; to give a croaker. For synonyms in the sense of circumvention, see FLOORED.
FRENCH SYNONYMS. Avoir son affaire (familiar: this also means to have got ‘a settler,’ and ‘to be absolutely drunk’); buter (thieves’ = ‘to kill’ or ‘execute’); escarper (thieves’); envoyer essayer une chemise de sapin (military: literally ‘to send one to try on a deal shirt.’ Cf., ‘wooden surtout’ = coffin); faire suer un chêne (popular: suer = to sweat; chêne = cove); faire passer le goût du pain (familiar = ‘to give one his gruel’); coffier (thieves’: an abbreviation of escoffier, to kill); conir (thieves’); ébasir (thieves’: formerly esbasir; Fourbesque sbasire and Germania esbasir); mettre à l’ombre (general = to put in the shade); endormir (thieves’); entailler (thieves’); abasourdir (thieves’: properly ‘to astound’); chouriner or suriner (thieves’: ‘chourin’ or surin = a knife); estourbir (thieves’); scionner (thieves’: from scion = a knife); faire un machabée (thieves’: in cant machabée = a drowned corpse. Michel thinks the expression originated either in the reading of II. Macabees, ch. xii., which is still retained in the Mass for the Dead, or through la danse macabre, the Dance of Death shown in the engravings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries); faire flotter un pante (popular = to cook one’s goose by drowning. Flotter = to float, i.e., like a corpse); crever la paillasse (popular: literally ‘to rip open the mattress’); laver le linge dans la saignante (thieves’: to wash linen in blood): dévisser le trognon à quelqu’un (popular); entonner (popular: see Michel); estrangouiller (popular = ‘to strangle’; from a veterinary term étranguillon = ‘the strangles’); tortiller la vis, or le gaviau (thieves’); terrer (thieves’: to ‘guillotine’); faire la grande soulasse (thieves’: soulas, Old French = ‘solace’ or ‘comfort’); rebâtir un pante (thieves’); sonner (popular); lingrer (popular); envoyer ad patres (popular = ‘to send to one’s fathers’); envoyer en paradis (general = ‘to send to kingdom-come’); envoyer en parade (thieves’ = ‘to send on parade’); capahuter (thieves’ = to get rid of an accomplice to secure his share of the booty; sometimes rendered by refroidir à la capahut); décrocher (military: literally ‘to unhook,’ ‘to take down’); descendre quelqu’un (popular = to bring down); couper le sifflet (popular = to cut one’s whistle); watriniser (popular: in reference to M. Watrin, who was murdered by the Decazeville miners in 1886. Cf., the English ‘to burke’); moucher le quinquet (popular: ‘to snuff the lamp’); faire saigner du nez (thieves’ = ‘to give a bloody nose’); sabler (thieves’); faire banque (common); súager (thieves’: from súer, ‘to sweat’).
GERMAN SYNONYMS. Abfetzen (to kill by cutting or stabbing); abmeken, abmacken (Hebrew mocho = to put aside, to destroy, or to give ‘tit for tat.’ North German afmurksen); bekern machen (from the Hebrew peger. Used of animals it is the equivalent of krepieren); hargenen or horeg sein (‘to kill’ or ‘murder.’ Horeg, the murderer; Horug, the murdered; nehrog, murdered; nehrog werden, to be murdered; Hereg or Harigo, the murder); heimthun, or heimerlich spielen (heim, a corruption of the Hebrew chajim = life); Kappore machen or fetzen (literally ‘to make purified.’ From the Hebrew kophar); memissen or mēmissren; die Neschome nehmen (Hebrew neschomo, the soul or life); pegern or peigern; rozechenen or rozchenen (Hebrew, rozach = to kill); schächten (Hebrew, schochat).
ITALIAN SYNONYM. Sbasire (literally ‘to cause to faint’ or ‘swoon.’ Sbasire su le funi = to swoon on the rope, i.e., to be hanged).
SPANISH SYNONYMS. Apretar á uno la nuez (properly to clutch the Adam’s apple, i.e., the throat); apiolar (properly ‘to gyve a hawk’ or ‘to tie game together by the legs’; and metaphorically, ‘to seize’ or apprehend); despabilar (literally ‘to snuff a candle.’ Cf., Fr. moucher le quinquet and the Eng. ‘to put on an extinguisher’); apercollar (also, ‘to seize one by the collar’).
1851–61. H. MAYHEW, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. III., p. 360. When the clarences, the cabs that carry four, came in, they COOKED the hackney-coachmen in no time.
1853. REV. E. BRADLEY (‘Cuthbert Bede’), The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman, p. 270. Billy ’s too big in the Westphalias. Gig-lamps, you ’re the boy to COOK Fosbrooke’s GOOSE.
1861. A. TROLLOPE, Framley Parsonage, ch. xlii. Chaldicotes, Gagebee, is a COOKED GOOSE, as far as Sowerby is concerned. And what difference could it make to him whether the Duke is to own it or Miss Dunstable.
1865. G. A. SALA, A Trip to Barbary, ch. v. The first Napoleon … once nearly killed himself by his addictedness to Provençal cookery. Yes; a mess of mutton and garlic—’tis said it was poisoned—very nearly COOKED THE GOOSE of Achilles.
1877. W. H. THOMSON, Five Years’ Penal Servitude, ii. 128. Seeing how the fellow was acting he sent him two ‘shise’ notes, which gave him a dose that ‘COOKED’ him. I saw the man myself, serving his time at Dartmoor.
1888. Puck’s Library, May, p. 10. When the chromo first emerged from chaos, the producers of that kind of picture insisted that the GOOSE of the artist was COOKED.
