Eggcorn Forum

Very nice find. I do recall hearing it from time to time.

What I really like is the example which explains the imagery. You can’t do much better than a firsthand account…

You cracked me up when you wrote that comments “get your goat”... the expression is “get my goad,” as in, being goaded into a response… :LOL … but what you said makes for a cooler visual :LOL
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/ar … 52534.html

What cracks ME up is that the person making the “correction” is admiring the eggcorn requirement of “a cooler visual”—just the way WE do when we spot a particularly clever eggcorn!!

(but why do we use “goat”? do we know, or is it just some phenomenally ancient idiot—er, idiom?)

When we’re raised with a particular idiom, no matter how absurd it may be, it remains unremarkable. I remember people complaining of their goats being got as well as exhortations to ‘stop playing the goat’.
For the goatless though, it may be necessary to press another word into service. I don’t know quite how far we can take this thing, but ‘gourd’ can be used to mean ‘head’ which makes at least as much sense as the original:

What really gets my gourd is all the time and money that is wasted conducting these surveys, asking questions that have only one obvious answer. ...
www.catholicexchange.com/node/58945 – 32k – Cached

+ another 16 or so…

I never would have thought that there would be a gray boundary between an eggcorn and a snowclone, but the more I search for eggcorns by the fill-in-the-blank method, the more I’m convinced that virtually any reasonable word (in the blank) will produce a few Google hits. I’m not sure whether this casts new light or new shadow.

I think you’re completely right about the horse-racing thing. This is one of those lexical “urban legends” that gets passed around without any evidence. As far as I can tell, almost all the usual suspects – Michael Quinion, Word Detective, even Wikipedia – call this story into question. But weirdly, the entry for “get someone’s goat” at the American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (3d ed.) repeats the tale without much in the way of skepticism:

To make someone annoyed or angry: “Gavin may seem unflappable, but I know a way to get his goat.” This expression comes from a tradition in horse racing. Thought to have a calming effect on high-strung thoroughbreds, a goat was placed in the horse’s stall on the night before the race. Unscrupulous opponents would then steal the goat in an effort to upset the horse and cause it to lose the race.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search? … e’s%20goat

It’s this kind of thing that makes me a much bigger fan of Merriam Webster products than AH stuff.

As for the origins of the phrase, Wilson wasn’t claiming that the “confidence,” etc. meaning was still around – just that it had a role in the phrase’s beginning.

I’m not sure whether he’s right or not. The problem with the evidence he gives is that he offers sentences using “goat” without any more context – so we folks at home can’t decide whether his evaluation of what “got my goat” meant in a particular newspaper article from 1907 was right or not.

The one thing that his evidence did convince me of, however, was that there were a number of strange metaphorical uses of “goat” floating around in the period 1905-20 that just aren’t in the language anymore. And some of the earliest uses of “got my goat,” etc. that he cites seem plainly odd by today’s standards. There does seem to have been a bit of “semantic flux” surrounding the phrase at the time, but I’d need to see bigger chunks of those newspaper articles before I could tell whether Wilson was on the right track or not.

Speaking of “the whole nine yards” and the American Dialect Society, I wonder whether people caught this Language Log post on that phrase from June – there’s actually been a small breakthrough in trying to solve the mystery of “the whole nine yards.” The origin is still obscure, but the lexicographers may be closing in: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 04623.html

This excerpt from a book by Robert Forsyth in 1805 indicates that building stone was sold in units of 6 cubic yards:

The beauties of Scotland They are commonly about four feet high, three feet broad at the bottom, and eighteen inches at the top; and generally costs fourteen pence the six yards ; but all the stone are laid down by the employer, and the turf is cut by the undertaker.

Here’s evidence that bolts of cloth were standard in six-yard lengths – at least in Madagascar.

Monthly consular and trade reports, United States, 1881 (from Madagascar) I would, therefore, say to our manufacturers and exporters, should they ever conclude to try to secure a part of this trade, 1) send goods of good quality ; [...] 5) let the number of yards in a piece be six, or a multiple of six. Formerly all the prints brought here, or nearly so, were in six yard pieces, called “patnas”, but now larger pieces are the most in demand and some of the merchants tell me that at the present time they are not even particular as to pieces containing odd numbers of yards, saying that they dispose of them in some way. But I think this concession is due to the practice of the exporter in not charging for the surplus yards. The samples in this lot called handkerchiefs are not used for the purposes that name would imply ; but for making fancy petticoats or skirts for the women, a garment for which they require just six yards in length of material, which they cut into two pieces of three yards each and sew together lengthwise, and the garment is finished by sewing the two ends of this double breadth together.

Together these support the idea that “the whole six yards” might originally not have required an explanation for those immersed in a duodecimal system of weights and measures.

Last edited by burred (2012-12-31 09:23:20)