Scott from Valdosta, Georgia, remembers his father using the phrase in a goat house looking for wool referring to “searching in a place where you won’t find what you’re looking for.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “In A Goat House Looking For Wool”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, my name’s Scott. How are you?
Hey, Scott. I’m doing well. Where are you calling us from?
Valdosta, Georgia.
What are you thinking about there in Valdosta, Georgia?
Whenever I’d go to my dad, you know, sometimes saying, well, you know, I want a drink or can I have some money or just whatever.
And he had a saying that he would frequently use. He’d say that I was in a goat house looking for wool.
I understand the meaning behind that, but what I don’t understand is where did that come from?
Where did that phrase originate?
And I was hoping maybe you could help clear that up.
Well, Scott, what did he mean?
I assume a goat house is a place where they have goats and sheep produce wool.
So if you go to a goat house, you’re looking for a sheep, you’re in the wrong place.
What you’re looking for doesn’t exist.
This is a good one.
Usually it’s put something more like can’t get wool off a goat or come to the goat’s house for wool, something like that.
Sometimes people say gather goat’s feathers or about as easy as finding wool on a goat’s back, a lot of different variations of this.
But the idea is that goat’s wool isn’t very important and it’s not very useful because there is such a thing as goat’s wool.
It’s just not as good as sheep’s wool and you can’t do much with it.
And it dates back to, oh, the 1500s.
There was the idea of quarreling about goat’s wool from the writings of Horace.
And it basically meant quarreling about a question that could never be decided.
Because the idea was that what goats have to offer is nearly worthless, at least compared to sheep.
So perhaps goat’s wool shouldn’t even be called wool.
And people would bicker about this.
And in fact, it has been called goat’s wool.
And you can find plenty of mentions of goat’s wool in old texts.
But yeah, so it’s not quite that you can’t find wool in a goat’s house.
It’s just that what’s the point of going for wool in a goat’s house when there are so many other better places and ways to get wool?
Variants of that phrase go all the way back to the 1500s.
That’s right, yeah.
How about that?
And it’s not just in the United States.
You find it in the UK and Scotland, Ireland.
We can find it in the U.S. at least as far back as the 1830s.
There are other things that are similar.
People talk about gathering or finding toad feathers or getting feathers from a toad.
It’s the same idea that you go to someone or something for a thing that you just can’t get there.
Your father might have said, you might as well get feathers from a toad as to get money from me.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And he was an extremely educated man, so he may have actually have known the origins.
I just never thought to ask him.
He may have.
He may have indeed.
Thank you for your call.
Appreciate it very much.
Scott, take care.
Thank you for the information, and y’all have a fantastic day.
You too.
Be well.
