As Disorganized as a Goat Rodeo

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Bill from Phoenix City, Alabama.

Hey, Bill.

Welcome to the show.

My friend is a retired Army Ranger and a surgeon for over 40 years, and he’s always had a wealth of great stories to tell and anecdotes from his career, both in the Army and in medicine.

And I would describe him kind of as a master of colloquialisms with a minor in the creative use of expletives.

Just a minor, huh?

That’s right.

Well, I’m going to be nice at this point.

One of the stories he peppers in with, like I said, a lot of interesting words and phrases.

And one which has crept in my speech lately is a real goat rope.

He usually uses it in a situation where he’s trying to describe a difficult or chaotic situation or someone who has made something unnecessarily complicated.

But the phrase, a real goat rope, I was just wondering what it meant.

I never really asked him how right.

I was maybe a little bit afraid to ask him, but I wanted to see what your thoughts were that.

Bill, you’re saying goat rope, like the animal, right?

Right. G-O-A-T, the first word, and the last word is rope, R-O-P-E.

Goat rope.

Now, I know there are variants of goat rodeo sometimes and goat roping.

Okay.

I have done some digging on this, Bill, for my book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, which I published in 2006.

When I was researching it the first time, I found a use in 1951 of a particular kind of comedic writing that people do when they want to talk about being really surprised by a situation.

And this is a classic example.

It’s a military official.

And he writes, I’ve been to two world fairs, goat roping in Idaho and caught off at Unsan, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

So he’s talking about the chaos of a world fair, the chaos of a goat rodeo and the chaos of a military operation.

But this new thing has really got him surprised.

There was a fellow by the name of Dick West.

I don’t know if you remember him, but in the 1960s, he was a popular newspaper columnist.

He loved this construction.

He had a bunch of different variations of it.

I’ve been to county fairs, a Tom Thumb wedding, and a goat roping, so you might say that I have led a rather sophisticated life.

Okay, great.

Well, that may explain why it came over into the Army usage, too, if your first example, and I think maybe that’s where he picked it up, a phrase that’s more common as far as military usage, too.

But you know what’s interesting about it, Bill, is that it kind of fell out of use for a while, and then sometime in the 1980s, it just kind of pops back up.

I found a bunch of uses in Southern newspapers related to politics.

Different newspapers, not wire stories, so locally reported stories.

All of them are quoting an anonymous political operative using goat rope or goat roping to refer to some chaotic situation.

Sure, sure.

So when you’re talking about a goat rodeo or a goat rope, you’re talking about a loud, noisy, sort of chaotic situation.

People running all over the place.

Goats running all over the place.

It’s just.

Well, usually at a rodeo, you have like the big events where the experts and the professionals kind of do what, you know, ride Broncos or whatever.

And then there are kid events or amateur events where anybody can try their hand at throwing a lasso over a goat.

And it’s usually hilarious because the goats.

Not for the goat.

Well, not for the goat, but for the people watching and the participants.

It’s not a.

Kind of like a grease pig rally or something like that.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, pretty much you’re lucky if anybody wins.

That’s how chaotic they are.

Oh, okay.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

Well, Bill, something tells me that you have a whole treasure trove of other expressions like that, so I’m hoping that you’ll call us again sometime.

Oh, gosh, yeah.

Okay, thank you so much, Bill.

Thanks, Bill.

Thank you.

All right, Bill.

Bye-bye.

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Email words@waywordradio.org.