Get Your Goat

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joyce. I’m from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Well, hi, Joyce. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on.

What’s on your mind today?

I wondered about a phrase,

Don’t let anyone get your goat.

I know this story that my parents had told me,

But I have been unable to find any place elsewhere it’s written down.

We would love to hear that story.

The story is set in the early 1800s, and it’s about a farmer.

He lives in a village that’s in the heart of Sicily,

And in the fall of every year, tradition dictates that two different families

Have to give up one of their animals to the church.

The short of it is that they finally decide on this goat, Nina the goat, to give,

And he is taking the goat to the church when he becomes angry

Because it’s been a very tough year and they don’t have very much.

And he hears a voice.

We don’t know if it’s a goat or someone else.

And the goat tells him not to get angry, basically, but to get smart.

And when he gets there, he says, you know, should my goat happen to get free?

You know, my family would come and work at the church one day out of the month every year.

And the priest takes us all in, and then ultimately the goat does escape,

And they work in the church, and the farmer goes through life learning not to let people get his goat.

And you say that’s from where?

Sicily.

Sicily.

My father was born in Sicily, and my mother’s parents were born in Sicily.

And one of the phrases they like to use a lot when my brother and I would get upset is,

Don’t let anyone get your goat.

I’ve got to say something about that story, though.

It’s almost a little too pat, if you know what I mean.

I’ve never heard it.

I didn’t find anything else that was written anywhere except some vague references to goats being kept with horses.

Yeah, now that’s the story that I’ve seen floating around most often,

That horses, thoroughbreds, tend to be calmed by having a small animal in the stall with them.

And having grown up in Kentucky, I’ve talked with people in the horse industry,

And indeed, they say that a lot of people keep a dog with a horse or a cat with a horse or a goat with a horse just to kind of have a little companion.

And the idea of that story is that if you got your goat taken away from you, then you’d be at loose ends, right, at sixes and sevens.

Right.

Well, when I looked at that, they said that there was uses of that phrase prior to when that was a popular or, you know, a common, I guess, thing to do.

But I really felt I didn’t find anything pretty conclusive.

So I’ve often wondered if there was any other explanation.

Well, it seems that goat has been a slang term for anger.

And back in the early 1900s, it was in a book about prison life as meaning anger.

And that makes more sense to me.

Don’t let anybody get your goat.

Don’t anybody let you get your ire up.

Right.

Yeah, Joyce, I would agree with Grant on this.

It just seems like sometimes the more elaborate those stories are, the more suspicious we should be of them.

And I think this is probably one of those cases, although it’s a good story.

It’s particularly the case when we can’t find the original story in print anywhere because stories don’t travel with that kind of detail for that long.

Right.

Does that make sense?

The oral transmission of stories tends to be fraught with all kinds of complications and corruptions.

Yeah, so I guess the bottom line here is that nobody’s really sure, but I’m putting my money on the goat is anger, sort of goading even.

Yeah, you will occasionally, very rarely, find people miswrite this as get one’s goad, G-O-A-D.

And I’m not suggesting that is an origin story.

It’s just how some people have reanalyzed the expression in order to kind of try to make sense of why there’s a goat in it at all.

Well, Joyce…

I appreciate your efforts trying to track it down.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Sometimes I don’t know is a really great answer

Because it’s better than just making stuff up.

True.

Thank you so much for your call, Joyce.

We’re glad to be of some assistance.

I’ll talk to you again. Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

We’d love to help you with your origin stories.

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