Goody For Our Side And Your Side Too - Analysis

A joke that keeps pointing to the same truth: foreignness is relative

Ogden Nash’s central claim is disarmingly simple: nobody is essentially a foreigner; foreignness is just a matter of where you’re standing. He starts with definitions that sound like a children’s primer—Foreigners are people somewhere else, Natives are people at home—and then immediately flips the reader’s footing with Rome: if the place you’re at is your habitat, then in Rome You’re a foreigner. The poem keeps returning to that swiveling perspective. Wherever you locate home, somebody else’s home becomes your abroad, and the categories we treat as solid turn out to be moveable labels.

The scales of Justice versus the seesaw of viewpoint

Nash gives the relativity of identity a moral gloss: the scales of Justice balance true, and tit leads into tat. In other words, if you insist on being the measuring stick—if you get to be native by default—then the same logic will come back on you the moment you change places. The line the man who’s at home / When he stays in Rome / Is abroad when he’s where you’re at treats justice not as a court verdict but as a symmetry built into language and location. Yet the joke also hints at a tension: even if justice “balances,” people don’t like to feel balanced out. They prefer an advantage, and the rest of the poem shows how quickly that preference turns into contempt.

Costumes, certificates, and the thinness of “essential” difference

The second stanza pretends to talk bureaucracy—birth certificates that sat us—but the point is psychological: leaving your country is not Just a change of scene but a change of status. Nash underlines how arbitrary that status is by parading stereotypes almost like stage props: The Frenchman with a fetching beard, The Scot with kilt and sporran. These details acknowledge that differences are visible, even theatrical, and yet they don’t add up to the only essential / Differential, which is simply living different places. The tension here is between what’s obvious to the eye (beards, kilts) and what’s actually decisive socially (who counts as “from here”). Nash makes “race” seem like a category people reach for when they could just admit the smaller, truer fact: geography is doing most of the work.

Pride’s trick: turning hosts into owners and neighbors into aliens

The poem’s sharpest accusation lands in the third stanza: such is the pride of prideful man that wherever he is, / He regards as his, and therefore tags the locals as aliens. The word “alien” is the key escalation. It’s no longer a neutral “foreigner,” just “somewhere else”; it’s a suspicion-word, a way of implying someone doesn’t belong even when they are, literally, the native. This is Nash’s most biting contradiction: the traveler can arrive somewhere and emotionally annex it, behaving like a rightful owner while treating the actual residents as intruders. The joke becomes a diagnosis of entitlement—how quickly “I am here” turns into “this is mine.”

The friendly bargain that turns lethal: hence... the coroner

Midway through, the poem pivots from playful definitions to a darker little fable. The foreigner offers a neat, civil agreement—I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends—and Nash comically dresses cooperation in grammar: Like a preposition and a dative, parts that only make sense together. But the deal collapses on a single revealing line: If our common ends seem mostly mine. The “common” was never common; it was a disguised takeover. The insult you ignorant foreigner gets thrown back and forth, and the stanza ends with an abrupt thud: And hence, my dears, the coroner. That jump—from bickering over status to death—feels exaggerated, but it’s Nash’s point: once people turn belonging into a competition, consequences stop being merely verbal.

A manners lesson with teeth: you’re always someone’s foreigner

The ending returns to lightness—mind your manners, rapport that may fall Ecstatically exquisite—but it’s lightness with a warning label. Nash proposes one simple thought to eliminate the coroner: You may be a native in your habitat, / But to foreigners you’re just a foreigner. The final line doesn’t moralize about being “nice” in the abstract; it offers a practical mental swap. If you can hold the fact that your own “native” identity dissolves the moment someone else looks at you, then pride loses its favorite weapon: the ability to treat “foreign” as a permanent stain on other people and a permanent privilege for yourself.

One unsettling question the poem leaves hanging: if the only essential / Differential is place, why do the speakers keep reaching for contempt—ignorant foreigner, aliens—as if location were a moral failing? Nash’s joke implies the answer: the category foreigner is useful precisely because it lets someone pretend their advantage is natural, not temporary, even though Rome (and the poem’s own logic) keeps proving otherwise.