![]() It was part of a series called "Experience of a Shop Girl": He then sent his findings to an American Dialect Society listserv, and other word sleuths were able to track down an even earlier citation from a 1905 edition of the New York journal Public Opinion. Michael Quinion, a word detective and writer of the blog World Wide Words, quotes a 1927 writer who called the expression "one of the most absurd slang phrases in the English language." Quinion goes on to say that it's difficult to disagree with the writer, and "even worse, nobody has much of a clue where comes from."īen Zimmer, who writes a language column for the Wall Street Journal, set out to predate the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation of "get your goat." Based on articles he found in digitized newspaper databases, Zimmer was able to push the date back to 1906. Our advice is don't spend too much time on this phrase - it'll just get your goat. ![]() They simply mean what they mean.įor instance, have you ever thought about the phrase "get someone's goat"? You may already know that it means to annoy or anger someone, but why? Idioms generally don't get clearer the longer you think about them.
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