Swoose

Mr. Peirce had already promised the bird to me, and so, during the summer, hearing that a more or less fabulous fowl had arrived from nowhere in particular, I visited the Park and Mr. Peirce’s long lost “Swoose.”

A bird prodigy of evil and hybrid character is the despair of a Norfolk farmer. It rejoices in the name of the “swoose”, a portmanteau word indicating its origin, for its father was a swan and its mother a goose. This ill-assorted pair had three children — three “sweese”.

And this one's a cross between a swan and a goose, and we call him a swoose.

I had been the mistress of fourteen turtles over a number of years, and I could boast having been bitten by, along with the standard animals, a horse, a swoose, and a camel.

Well by the time all the cooks in that broth got through with it, by the time it emerged from the Congress, it was a "swoose." It was not swan and it was not goose, it was a "swoose." It was a "swoose" to its dying day, which hasn't quite arrived yet, but its [sic] imminent.

The associate in arts or A.A. degree, another "swoose," has quickly established itself as the community college degree in a degree-obsessed nation.

But Mom describes my life that year pretty accurately when she says that I had become a “swoose”- that is to say, not a swan and not a goose.

"John calls teenagers 'sweese.'" "What?" "Neither swans nor geese."