Although there is some dispute about how this colorful term for the uncanny ability of some people to rile us, annoy us, irritate us, vex us, and get under our skin, most lexicographers attribute the origins of
get your goat to the world of thoroughbred horse racing. Horse trainers have long put a companion in stalls with high-strung thoroughbreds, particularly volatile stallions. ... Goats, among the most boring and least demanding of animals, soothed horses effectively.
Horses tended to become attached to their goat roommates, so much so that rival barns sometimes would steal the goat of a rival the night before a race. The horse would become upset and presumably underperform the next Dayton. So someone whose goat has been gotten is actually being compared to a horse rather than a goat.
-- from
Who Put the Butter in Butterfly?, David Feldman
to get one’s goat ... Efforts have been made to trace this American expression back to a Greek source, but without conspicuous success. The French, however, do have an expression,
prendre la chevre, which, though defined, “to take offense,” has the literal meaning, “to take, or to snatch, the goat.” Their expression is said to have appeared as early as the sixteenth century, and does appear in seventeenth century as well as current dictionaries. Nevertheless it is most probable that American usage, traceable only to the early twentieth century , was of independent origin: first, because the French phrase does not have the same literal meaning, and, second, even if it did, the borrowing and literal translation would have been much earlier. One account weakly explains our phrase as derived from the racing stable where, sometimes, a goat browses among the horses on the theory that it has a calming effect upon high-strung racers. Deliberate borrowing of the goat from such a stable might thus be considered an unfriendly act, according to that explanation. Be that as it may, the earliest literary quotation thus far exhumed appears in Jack London’s
Smoke Bellew (1912), Chapter VII, “The Little Man,” in which the usage has nothing to do with horse-racing. Here “Smoke” and “the little man” face the danger of crossing a rotting snow-bridge over a crevasse. “The little man” crosses first and waits for “Smoke.” “‘Your turn,’ he called across. ‘But just keep a-coming and don’t look down. That’s what got my goat. Just keep a-coming, that’s all. And get a move on. It’s mighty rotten.’”
-- from
Heavens to Betsy! & Other Curious Sayings, Charles Funk
Another theory, from
me:
The phrase might be connected to the Army-Navy football rivalry. The goat has been the Navy mascot since at least 1893 (see
http://www.nadn.navy.mil/PAO/facts/Goat.html) and I believe that the two academies have tried to kidnap each other’s mascots (Army’s is a mule) ever since. The date and place of first usage would fit, and the meaning of “getting one’s goat” to be an irritant would be a direct lift.
