moderizing "boo to a goose"?

[Evan Hall]

There is an expression "wouldn't say boo to a goose" that appears a handful of times in the SE corpus, but sometimes spelled "bo" or "boh".  Would these be appropriate to modernize to "boo"?

• Ngram viewer suggests that "bo" and "boh" are older forms that have lost popularity.
• Github results for "to a goose" in the SE corpus shows the few candidates for the proposed change.

I don't know whether these qualify as sound-alike, since I'm not sure how the phrase was spoken at the time these books were published. It seems that the "boo" form is the only one with much contemporary usage.

If this sounds okay, I'm happy to submit PRs for these. (One of them is in Scarlet Pimpernel, which I originally produced. I wasn't familiar with the expression at the time, but when I recently saw the modern form in print, I decided to look into it a little more.)

Evan.

[Alex Cabal]

I've come across this before and I don't think `boo` and `boh` are sound
alike. `bo` and `boh` are, but `boh` doesn't occur in the corpus at all.

On 1/14/26 12:36 AM, Evan Hall wrote:
> There is an expression "wouldn't say boo to a goose" that appears a
> handful of times in the SE corpus, but sometimes spelled "bo" or "boh".
> Would these be appropriate to modernize to "boo"?
>

> * Ngram viewer <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?
> content=bo+to+a+goose%2Cboo+to+a+goose%2Cboh+to+a+goose&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3> suggests that "bo" and "boh" are older forms that have lost popularity.
> * Github results for "to a goose" in the SE corpus <https://
> github.com/search?q=org%3Astandardebooks+
> %22to+a+goose%22&type=code&p=1> shows the few candidates for the

> proposed change.
>
> I don't know whether these qualify as sound-alike, since I'm not sure
> how the phrase was spoken at the time these books were published. It
> seems that the "boo" form is the only one with much contemporary usage.
>
> If this sounds okay, I'm happy to submit PRs for these. (One of them is
> in Scarlet Pimpernel, which I originally produced. I wasn't familiar
> with the expression at the time, but when I recently saw the modern form
> in print, I decided to look into it a little more.)
>
> Evan.
>

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[Evan Hall]

Okay, no problem. I wasn't sure about it.

"boh" does appear in the corpus, by the way. There are a couple in the search results I linked above, and searching "boh" itself turns up a few more.