![\"Bertie](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/geese.jpg\")
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What do you call a printer that doesn’t work? <\/p>\n
A wayzgoose<\/strong> [\u02c8we\u026az\u0261u\u02d0s].<\/p>\n A wayzgoose<\/strong>\u203d What’s that?<\/p>\n According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries<\/a>, a wayzgoose is “An annual summer dinner or outing held by a printing house for its employees.”<\/p>\n The Oxford Dictionaries blog<\/a> says that:<\/p>\n the wayzgoose was originally an entertainment given by a master-printer to his workmen to mark the beginning of the season of working by candlelight. In later use, it meant an annual festivity held in summer by the employees of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Traditionally the wayzgoose happened on 24th August, which is St Bartholomew’s Day, and St Bartholomew is the patron saint of bookbinders, and also of butchers, plasterers, cobblers, shoemakers and other leather workers [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n The origin of the word wayzgoose is uncertain. It was usually written waygoose in earlier sources (the earliest known use is 1683). The z was added in the late 19th century, however in the 1731 Universal Etymological English Dictionary<\/em> by Nathaniel Bailey, it is written with the z, and Bailey thought that the word wayz<\/strong> meant a bundle of straw or stubble, that a wayz-goose or stubble-goose was a goose fattened on the stubble left in fields after they were harvested, and that the wayz-goose was served at the wayzgoose feast.<\/p>\n