Get One's Goat

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Lexicon Valley Podcast

0:52From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo. We talked recently about the acronym G-O-A-T, as in Ali Gretzky Jordan Messi, as in the goat, the greatest of all time. But there's another kind of goat, you know, the ones with horns, and hooves, and beards. And every once in a while, somebody gets your goat.

Origin of Get My Goat

1:25What does that mean, and where does that expression come from? Linguist Ben Zimmer tried to find out. Well, I got interested in looking into the history of this one recently when I saw something on Twitter from Christopher Mims, who's a fellow columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He writes about technology for the journal. And on Twitter, he wrote, Apparently no one knows the true origin of the phrase, gets my goat. It's a mystery of the ancients, like Stonehenge.

1:56It's like catnip for you when you hear a cat. Exactly. You can't tell me that it's a mystery. That gets my goat when people say that. You get my goat. Lasseter's really got your goat, huh? Yeah, he does. And I want it back. God knows what he's doing to that poor thing. Buttercup likes to be an instigator. What? That means she was trying to get your goat. So I did some preliminary looking around just to see what the current theories were about the expression. And none of them are very satisfying, really.

2:28You might connect it to the scapegoat. You might think that it's related to the word goad somehow. If you're goading someone, maybe you're egging them on, and somehow goad became goat. There's another theory that connects it with an old French phrase, which literally means to take the goat. My French pronunciation is pretty awful. Let me see if I can try to pronounce it. Prendre la chevre. That's as close as I can get. What does that mean, to take the goat? Well, if you look in older dictionaries, it explains that expression as meaning to fly into a passion, to get irritated.

3:06You get irritated by taking the goat, but in the English expression, you're irritated if someone gets your goat. So there's something backwards there. Maybe there's some connection to that French phrase, but it's never been proven.

Slang Dictionaries

3:19So if we're looking for hard evidence, you can go to the slang dictionaries and see what they say. So, for instance, Jonathan Leiter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang or Green's Dictionary of Slang by recent guests of Lexicon Valley, Jonathan Green. Love that guy. Yeah. Now, they both have entries for this. They're historical entries, and so like the OED, they want to see exactly what the earliest evidence is. And both of those slang dictionaries start with a book written in 1904 called Life in Sing Sing.

3:57Life in Sing Sing was a book, as you can tell from the title, about prison life at the Sing Sing prison in New York. It was written by number 1500. So it was written by a prisoner who was never named. He's just given the number, number 1500. This was a prisoner who had spent six and a half years at Sing Sing. He was the editor of the prison newspaper, and he wrote this book about life in the prison, and he has a whole section called Slang Among Convicts. And goat is in there, not the full phrase, get one's goat, but just goat on its own.

4:31And it's defined there as anger or to exasperate. So it's still not clear how do you get from that to the full expression, get one's goat. Let me back up a second here. Do we think of goats as animals that are easily irritated? Is that something that's floating out there in the ether? If you think about the expression, get one's goat, it's not the goat who's exasperated or irritated. It's the person whose goat has been gotten. And so we need to figure out exactly how that full phrase works.

5:03We have this little bit of very tantalizing information from this book, Life in Sing Sing, but it doesn't really tell us much of anything other than goat could apparently mean anger or to exasperate among prisoners in 1904. So in the slang dictionaries, they start giving citations for the full phrase in 1908. But with an expression like this that comes from American slang, these days, it's pretty easy to take something, whether it's in the OED or in one of these historical slang dictionaries, and find antedatings, find earlier citations.

5:40And this has become something of a competitive sport among those of us who like to find the origins of words and phrases. Who can find the earliest known example? And sometimes you're just beating the other person by a month or even a week, but there's some glory in finding the very earliest known thing. But it can always be displaced because these days we have all of these great digitized databases of newspapers and magazines and books. And if you keep looking, if you keep sleuthing, then you might be able to trace it just a little earlier.

Antedating Examples

6:11And in fact, Ben, if you heard the interview that we did with Jonathan Green, I asked him about that very thrill of finding a citation that was not just earlier, but much earlier than any other citation that had previously been found, thereby dating a word to a time when nobody knew it existed. Yeah, there is a great thrill in that. I've had some of my own successes in that arena. But even a very small antedating, just taking it back, you know, a year or even months, can not only be satisfying, but help to build a picture of the early life of a word or phrase, especially one that's mysterious like this one.

6:46What does that mean to get your goat? If you gather enough of the very earliest known examples of it, then maybe you can start to figure out exactly what it means. So I tried to do that when I saw what the evidence was in the slang dictionaries. I figured, OK, let me see if I can beat 1908, which is when they start. And I was able to get it back a couple of years earlier to 1906. And what was interesting to me personally was that I was finding examples from a newspaper called the Jersey Journal, which is published in Jersey City, where I live, still published right there in Journal Square in Jersey City.

7:22So I was happy to see that this expression was known early on in Jersey City and the surrounding region that was served by this newspaper. Ben, I was born and raised in New Jersey City. Don't try to claim Jersey. You're a transplant. Yeah, you live there now. I'm no transplant. I was also born and raised in New Jersey. Were you? I don't know what you're accusing. Yes. But I grew up out in the boonies in Hunterdon County on a farm where you might actually expect to see goats. You don't see goats in Jersey City these days.

7:53Although, as I learned from reading the Jersey Journal, they did actually have goats about 100 years ago in Jersey City. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

8:26Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. I cannot believe I'm listening to two adult men quarreling over who has more claim to New Jersey-ness. This is, I mean, I don't even know what an analogy would be, but it, and listen, I've got some Jersey in me. I did my 11 months. I did a stretch in Paramus. In Paramus. Okay. Yeah. The mall, capital of the world. For the moment, we're going to be talking about Hudson County, where Jersey City and Hoboken are,

8:59and some of the examples that you find of this expression, get one's goat, being used way back in 1906. So, for instance, June 2nd, 1906. There's a headline in the Jersey Journal. Colored man, quote, got his goat, end quote, but there was a real goat in it, too, and Carmody budded into trouble. Then the article explains what happened. It describes a court case. It starts off, Judge, he got my goat, said William Carmody, 23 years old, of 302 2nd Street, Hoboken,

9:30when arraigned before Judge Higgins in the first criminal court on a charge of atrocious assault and battery preferred by John Bailey, colored of 276 11th Street. And it goes on to say that even though this guy says, Judge, he got my goat, there was really a goat involved in this story. There was a confrontation over who owned this goat. This guy, Carmody, thought that it was his and took it. The other guy, Bailey, complained. Carmody ends up hitting him in the head with a piece of coal. And so the joke here for the reader is that it is literal, right.

10:04Well, it was the vernacular being used to describe the literal. I mean, that's why the reporter was having fun with it. But, you know, it occurs to me, Ben, I know we're talking about the early 20th century in Hudson County, New Jersey or whatever, but it's hard for me to believe that this expression doesn't date back at least to the middle of the 19th century. It just sounds so Civil War-ish. It sounds like a phrase that Mark Twain would have used 30 years later. It does.

10:34I can't believe that you can't get beyond 1906. Well, you can get a little earlier. This was just my first foray into trying to play the antedating game. I was very interested to see that, you know, it could be in a headline of the Jersey Journal in 1906 and people would get the joke. It's put in quotation marks, so maybe that's an indication that it was still kind of a new expression, but it doesn't need to be explained for the reader. It's like, oh, yeah, I get it. He got his goat, literally and figuratively. And in fact, in 1907, there was another Jersey Journal article that played on the literal and figurative meaning of the expression.

11:11So the 1907 article says it is easy to, quote, get the goat, end quote, of the police of the second precinct now for locked up in a cell at the 7th Street police station is a nanny. That is a nanny goat that was arrested by Roundsman Sniffin for her obstreperous conduct in Jersey Avenue yesterday. Maybe even the same writer, who knows, having some fun with the expression, get one's goat where an actual goat is involved in the streets of Jersey City.

11:41I can vouch for the fact that there are no goats walking around Jersey City currently, but in 1906, 1907, this was apparently a fact of life there in Hudson County. You know, Ben, you suggested that when a term or phrase is new in the lexicon, it often appears first in quotes, and that's certainly true. I'm familiar with that phenomenon. But it occurs to me that these two expressions in 1906 and 1907 in the Jersey Journal might be in quotes because of the double meaning, because of the double figurative and literal meaning. Yeah, it sure sounds to me like the joke was plain because the expression was already in common usage.

12:19Yeah. It's hard for me to imagine under these journalistic circumstances that this was newfangled at all. It makes me think even more that it's got roots far predating 1906 and, you know, maybe by decades. It's common usage. In order for that story to have been written, this phrase had to be either in common usage or so au courant that it was begging for attention. You know, I was puzzled by this, too. So what I did was I presented my findings to a mailing list that I contribute to, the American Dialect Society mailing list.

12:52And that is populated by people who care as much as I do about trying to figure out the earliest uses of these words and phrases, especially if they come up in American slang like this. In other words, nerds. Word nerds. Exactly. Hardcore word nerds who love language, love history, and have a willingness to dive deep into these databases and try to find little clues that might tell them about where a word or phrase comes from. And so, sure enough, once these word sleuths started sniffing around, they found all sorts of interesting things.

13:26Part of what they found was that it wasn't just getting your goat that you could say back then. You could also talk about losing your goat, which meant losing your composure. And, in fact, I ended up finding that in the Jersey Journal, too. In March 1906, Joseph Dunn, 24 years old, of 88 Beacon Avenue, lost, quote, his goat, end quote, yesterday. When small boys with hard snowballs used him for a target. So, goat becomes a synonym for, like, equanimity. Yes, exactly.

13:57Equanimity, composure. You lose your cool if you lose your goat. But if someone gets your goat, then they're taking that composure or equanimity away from you somehow. So, American Dialect Society mailing list participants started looking. And the earliest beating me by just a bit comes from late in 1905. This currently is the one still to beat. October 21st, 1905, in a magazine called Public Opinion, a woman named Elizabeth Howard Westwood was writing a series called Experience of a Shop Girl

14:38to report on what it was like to be a Shop Girl in New York at this time period when the big department stores, I think, were starting up. And in an installment of this series called In the Working Girl's Home, she describes a scene where she finds a room at a house for working girls in Manhattan on West 18th Street. And she ends up rooming with a girl named Alice Bailey. They become friends, but one of the other girls chastises them on their table manners, saying,

15:12This ain't no ordinary boarding house. It's a refined working girls' home. And then it's reported that Alice says, Well, that gets my goat the nerve of her. There's no explanation of it in the text. It's just considered part of the slang that the shop girl would know and use in 1905. And it's not in quotes, although I guess it's a piece of dialogue, so perhaps it is in quotes, but for a different reason. Yeah, this is reported speech where it's shown to be very authentic.

15:43There's no kind of glossing of like things that she's saying. It's just, you know, this is the way that this girl Alice talks. But it does suggest that it exists on the street in a sense. Yes, absolutely. It's on the street. And if you look at the early examples beyond the ones that I just mentioned, you start to see certain patterns about who's using this, not just shop girls or people in Jersey City in court because of their goats, but also, crucially, boxers and people in the Navy.

16:14What's interesting, after I presented this to the American Dialect Society and people started contributing with their own examples from that early time period, 1905, 1906, that actually inspired a blogger named Peter Wrighton, who writes under the Nom de Blog, Peter Jensen Brown. He's got a blog called Early Sports and Pop Culture History. He had been collecting evidence of his own, and he combined it with what we had found. And he paints a very compelling story about the history and etymology of this expression,

16:49where, in his argument, it was really Navy boxers who were most responsible for the early use of this expression. Why? Why Navy boxers? Part of the explanation is that goats were used as mascots on Navy ships. You might be familiar with the tradition that continues. Army-Navy, yeah. The Army-Navy game, exactly. So the U.S. Naval Academy has a goat as a mascot.

17:21Right. It's Bill the Goat. Sometimes you hear stories about the goat getting kidnapped before the big Army-Navy game. Sure. It's a tradition that goes back a long time. So goats had been used as mascots on sailing vessels probably all the way back to the 18th century. The goats could actually be a source of milk, which in the days before refrigeration was quite a helpful thing. Meanwhile, there would also be this tradition of boxing on board as well. And so if we look at some of the early examples from this time period, just a little bit later in 1905,

17:56there is an article that appeared in Collier's magazine about the U.S. Navy. And it appears there, too, in a bit of dialogue. You were there, too, then? You were ashore? Ha-ha. He slapped Patrick on the shoulder and lay back grinning at me. If that don't get my goat. The following month, in November 1905, there's a very interesting article in the Washington Times reporting on a boxing match between a British sailor and an American sailor. The British sailor ended up beating the American sailor.

18:28They say Jack was a scrawny-looking tar. He looked as though the beans did not agree with him at all. Jack was at sea. I think the crowd got his goat, or the idea of fighting, one or the other, because he did not say boo and sat down like a mope. Okay, so in that case, you know, it's interesting because if you hear the way that the crowd got his goat, it's not so much getting, like, angry or irritated. He somehow has lost the will to fight because of something going on with the crowd.

19:00But it definitely still ties into that idea of losing your composure, even if it seems to be used a little differently from how we would use it now. Right, like the crowd got to him, in a sense. Yeah, exactly. Got in his head. Right, right. What's interesting, actually, is that there were other stories about how a goat might be literally taken and that might be the source of this expression. So it became common, as I said, in boxing circles, particularly for boxers who came out of the Navy.

19:31So you might learn to box when you're in the Navy, and then you could become a prize fighter afterwards. And so if the expression came from the Navy, and then boxers in general started using this expression based on the Navy tradition, where you have a goat as a mascot, then it's interesting to see how people interpret that expression once it becomes popular in the boxing world. There is a very interesting article called The Prize Ring that appeared in 1910 in Pearson's magazine.

20:02This was written by a sports reporter who clearly knew a lot about boxing, but he doesn't say anything about the Navy or the fact that goats would be a mascot on a ship. He has a completely different explanation that comes from horse racing. So this is the way that Richard Barry, the writer of this article, The Prize Ring, explains it in 1910, when it's still a pretty new expression. He says, Originally, this phrase was racing slang. To keep a racehorse from going stale, a trainer frequently quarters with him a goat, for the pet relieves the thoroughbred of his loneliness.

20:38But intriguers have found that by stealing a goat from a horse a day or two before a great race, he can be thrown out of condition. The loss of his favorite companion annoys the horse, and he goes into the big event in a highly feminized state of nerves. So to get his goat is to remove his confidence. So this is a very elaborate explanation that's being given in 1910 to explain why boxers were talking about getting someone's goat. That sounds like wonderfully perfect, right?

21:10Not as perfect as a highly feminized state of nerves. Yes. The 1910 view of gender notwithstanding, it just sounds like something I want to believe. And a lot of people have accepted that as the explanation. It is true that there were goats that were kept in stables with horses. That is an actual tradition that actually happened. But, you know, I have to agree with Bob here. And by agree, I mean conjecture along with Bob.

21:40If in the very early 1900s, a man in Jersey City in court, or at least as interpreted through a journalist, is using that expression. If a young shop girl in Manhattan around the same time is using that expression, and if in 1910 we get this racehorsing story, which sheds a whole different light on the potential provenance of this expression, I got to believe that it dates much earlier. It just seems like it has to. It's bizarre because it just sort of comes on the scene suddenly.

22:15Again, a lot of people have been scouring the databases. You get a few examples from late 1905, examples from 1906, like the ones that I found, going into 1907. And then in 1908, it really hits the big time. People really know this expression, and it becomes popular enough that it's actually used in a song. There is sheet music that's published in June 1908 for a song called Somebody's Got My Goat. This was written by a songwriter named Edward Madden.

22:46The words to it go, Somebody's got my goat. He must have gone a-strollin'. Though he was old enough to vote, he's lost, strayed, or stolen. When he began to feel his oats, he went out chasing nanny goats. You never struck such a giddy old buck. Has anybody seen my goat? And there's a picture on the songbook of a goat chewing a tin can, of course. This was, again, sort of playing with the literal meaning of the goat and this figurative expression, which was common enough in 1908 that you could make a song out of it.

23:20So we're starting to fill in the picture. And we know now more than we did even just a few months ago before all these people started looking into the history of it.

Navy and Boxing Connections

23:30We've got some really interesting evidence about the Navy, about boxing. The horse racing explanation, the jury is still out on that because if that were true, then we would expect to find some of these early examples having to do with horse racing. But it's not being used that way. We find it in boxing pretty soon after that baseball writers are using the term, too. So do you think that this guy, Richard Barry, writing in, I think he said, Pearson's magazine, simply made up an origin story with regard to horse racing?

24:01I mean, that just doesn't make any sense, does it? Again, it was true that goats were being kept in stables with thoroughbreds and that that was seen to sort of calm them down. And so it's a very kind of, you know, reasonable explanation to say, hey, you take away the goat from the horse. You got his goat and now the horse won't run well. Right. And maybe Barry was just repeating a folk etymology that he had heard. That would be my guess. Yeah. And again, there have been lots of theories about it. It's interesting that this particular theory has been there since very early on, as early as 1910,

24:33which shows that people were already trying to figure out, wait, where did this expression come from? Why is everybody saying it all of a sudden? And like you said, it involves a number of various subcultures, right? Prison, boxing, the Navy, potentially horse racing, sports more generally, it seems. I think that our listeners can solve this. I think that there are probably, you know, horse racing publications or boxing publications that haven't been digitized, but somebody has in their closet who's listening to this podcast right now,

25:03all the back issues starting from 1883, and we're going to find something. And maybe this is a thread to tug at just for fun. President Benjamin Harrison had as one of the White House pets for his children a goat. One memorable story told of Harrison, this is the president of the United States, chasing the goat down Pennsylvania Avenue with his three grandchildren in tow and top hat in hand while waving his cane.

25:35Now, I suppose it's possible that that scene, apocryphal or not, became the basis of an expression, right? Losing one's composure in the process of literally getting your goat. Just saying is all. Wow. So this is even messier, really, than the SNARK etymology. It's true. I'm giving you another one that doesn't have a tidy explanation at all. There are a lot of loose ends here. But this is exciting because this shows exactly what can be done now. These expressions that date back this one more than 100 years, we don't have the full picture of it,

26:11but we can start working at it in this sort of collaborative process of people finding different bits of evidence and piecing them together and trying to find the most compelling explanation. Yeah. And this really does feel, if not solvable, if not definitively solvable, this feels as if we can find more information. I think, Mike, that the government should do this. This is a role that a big government should be taking on because, after all, big government, it's the nanny state.

26:43I do want to point out, though, that to contribute to this body of knowledge, you don't need to have any special training or scholarship. Many of the participants on the American Dialect Society mailing list are amateurs, basically. They just enjoy trying to figure out these mysteries. So the date to beat, just to repeat, is October 21st, 1905, and that was found by Stephen Gorenson on the American Dialect Society mailing list.

27:14That's the one with the shop girl. And so if anybody can find something even just a little bit earlier than October 1905, it could be quite valuable. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Whose goat is in a perpetual state of gotten-ness. It can't be ungotten at this point, so don't even try. If you find an example of the expression from before 1905, let us know at booksmartstudios at gmail.com.

27:46We will alert the proper goat herding authorities. All right, Mikey, we done here? We are done. Later, Gator.

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