{"id":9500,"date":"2014-12-03T13:19:07","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T13:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/megaphone.geeb.us\/?p=196"},"modified":"2014-12-03T13:19:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T13:19:07","slug":"get-your-goat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/?p=9500","title":{"rendered":"Get Your Goat"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1927, a writer in the Brazil Times<\/i> \u2014 not the country, but the place in Indiana \u2014 commented “get your goat”\u00a0was \u201cone of the most absurd slang phrases in the English language\u201d. It\u2019s hard to disagree, though plenty of\u00a0 candidates for the accolade come to mind. Even worse, nobody has much of a clue where it comes from.<\/span>
\nOur usual meaning is that somebody has goaded or teased another into signs of irritation or has \u2014 accidentally or deliberately \u2014 exasperated or annoyed them.<\/span>
\nIt has recently attracted attention from several language researchers. So far, we\u2019ve been able to establish that it\u2019s definitely American and that it had entered the language by 1903, when the famous boxer Kid McCoy was reminiscing about his exploits:<\/span>
\nI made a grievous mistake at the beginning of that fight. I started out to \u201cget his goat,\u201d so to speak, and I succeeded only too well. Stowart was so frightened that he wouldn’t fight.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indianapolis Sun<\/i>, 5 Dec. 1903.<\/span><\/div>\n

The idiom became very popular in the US and by 1914 had been taken to Canada, Britain, Australia and other countries.<\/span>
\nThe most frequent story that attempts to explain it relates to horse racing in North America and to the common practice of putting an animal in a horse\u2019s stall to befriend and calm it. The story says that a goat was the most common companion and that enterprising villains capitalised on the association by gambling on the horse to lose and then stealing the goat. A substantial ability to suspend one\u2019s disbelief is needed to accept this at face value.<\/span>
\nOther people have tried to identify it in some way with scapegoat<\/i>, have seen it as a variant form of goad<\/i>, and have linked it with an old French phrase prendre la ch\u00e8vre<\/i> (to take the goat). It has been claimed that at one time some residents of Harlem in New York kept goats and thereby annoyed their neighbours, an explanation that fails to satisfy. Another links it with the late nineteenth-century fashion for men to sport goatee beards, which children mocked with bleating noises. Another suggestion comes from a book of 1904 entitled Life in Sing Sing<\/i>, in which goat<\/i> is glossed as meaning anger. But evidence is lacking for all of them. The writer in the Brazil Times<\/i>tried another tack:<\/span>
\nThe origin of this phrase is essentially the same as that of the verb \u201cto kid\u201d and the other form \u201ckidding.\u201d A goat frolicking about is an absurd sight. \u201cDon\u2019t play the giddy goat\u201d is an old expression for \u201cDon\u2019t make a silly fool of yourself.\u201d \u201cTo kid\u201d is \u201cto make a fool of,\u201d since kids are really more foolish acting creatures than their parents, the goats. When one is eminently successful in kidding another he is said to \u201cget his goat.\u201d<\/span>
\nThis is a sensible suggestion but once again there\u2019s no evidence.<\/span>
\nHowever \u2014 at the risk of being responsible for starting a new spurious tale about its origins \u2014 one other strange usage exists. While looking for get my goat<\/i>, I repeatedly encountered the same notionally humorous story. This is its earliest appearance I can find:<\/span>
\nMr. and Mrs. Jones were starting for Church. \u201cWait dear,\u201d said the lady, \u201cI\u2019ve forgotten something; won\u2019t you go up and get my goats off the bureau?\u201d \u201cYour goats,\u201d replied Jones, \u201cwhat new fangled thing\u2019s that?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll show you, remarked the wife, and she sailed up stairs and down again with a pair of kids [kid gloves] on her hands; \u2018\u2018there they are,\u201d said she. \u201cWhy I call those things kids,\u201d said the surprised husband. \u201cOh, do you!\u201d snapped the wife. \u201cWell so did I once, but they are so old now, I\u2019m ashamed to call them anything but goats.\u201d Then they went on to church and smiled sweetly on their friends, and put a nickel in the missionary box, and the next day Jones\u2019 wife had a half dozen pairs of new gloves in a handsome lacquered box of the latest design.<\/span><\/p>\n

Steubenville Weekly Herald<\/i> (Steubenville, Ohio), 26 Mar. 1880.<\/span><\/div>\n

You may groan at the weakness of the joke, but it must have been a thigh-slapping, rib-tickling wonder of the times to judge by how often it was repeated. I counted 48 examples between 1880 and 1900 in American newspapers; it crossed the Atlantic within a year and at least a dozen versions appeared in British newspapers in the following two decades; it was almost immediately taken to Australia, where at least 38 versions were published between 1884 and 1904 (at this point I stopped counting).<\/span>
\nI\u2019m not suggesting it\u2019s the direct origin of the expression, but the phrase get my goats<\/i> must have been put into the minds of a lot of people through repetitions of the joke. This might have been combined with some slang usage of goat<\/i> \u2014 perhaps a play on kid<\/i> \u2014 to make the idiom we now have.<\/span>
\n 
\n-via Michael Quinlon’s World Wide Words<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1927, a writer in the Brazil Times \u2014 not the country, but the place in Indiana \u2014 commented “get your goat”\u00a0was \u201cone of the most absurd slang phrases in the English language\u201d. It\u2019s hard to disagree, though plenty of\u00a0 candidates for the accolade come to mind. Even worse, nobody has much of a clue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ghost.geeb.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}