GOAT. got it?
yesterday i called melissa to say hi and chat and all that good stuff. we were talking about something infuriating to both of us, and she said “and you know what really gets my goat?”
and i had to interrupt her well-formed rant because i was just like, where on earth did that saying come from?
so here’s your etymology saturday lesson!
the first time it was in print, it was in reference to a burst water pipe in 1909, about transferring water back and forth from the tub to a bowl and back again all night. that certainly would have been goat getting.
this is a relatively new phrase, as you can see from 1909, and one story is that it came from when goats were placed next to racehorses to keep them call. when people wanted to rig the race, some ill-mannered people would steal the horse’s goat, causing the horse to race poorly. but while that’s a nice story, it’s not widely accepted as the true source.
another idea is that the word goat was used as slang for anger around the early 1900s, which makes a little more sense.
yet another option is from the french phrase prendre le chevre, meaning take the goat, angering the owner. (i don’t like this one.)
i actually thought of this one while looking at various sources: a mispronunciation of goad. get your goad – like goading someone on.
or maybe we’re all just goat owners and we’d all be angry if someone tried to take away our goats!
we may never know the real origin, but i do like the slang idea. it was the idea that we all have an inner goat just waiting to get out there and be angry. so when something irks you, you get your goat out.
GOATS!
(hrrrmmmm i was going to link to a post i KNOW i did about the term scapegoat, but i think it was lost in the great blog migration. ugh! well, that’s another post, i guess!)