[Ads-l] GOATS and goats

[Ben Zimmer]

While the OED3 "goat" entry may not explicitly link senses 6 and 8, other
dictionaries seem to lump the two. See e.g. AHD sense 4: "A person who is
blamed for a failure or misfortune, especially a scapegoat," or MWCD sense
3, which cross-references  "scapegoat" sense 2 (i.e., a. "one that bears
the blame for others," b. "one that is the object of irrational
hostility"). Neither dictionary splits out the "player whose error is
blamed for a loss" sense.

In any case, I felt comfortable saying that the old sporting usage of
"goat" is likely a shortening of "scapegoat" when I wrote about "GOAT" for
my Wall Street Journal column on Aut. 19, 2016: https://on.wsj.com/3JJuWBs

As that may be paywalled, here's an excerpt:

---
Not surprisingly, the label can be traced back to Muhammad Ali, who often
called himself "the greatest of all time," or simply "the greatest," even
at the beginning of his boxing career in the early 1960s.
As Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman recently noted on their
Grammarphobia blog, the acronym appeared in 1992 as the name of a company
set up by Ali's wife Lonnie to manage his intellectual property. (G.O.A.T.
Inc. later changed its name to Muhammad Ali Enterprises and was acquired by
Authentic Brands Group.)
The acronym didn't hit the big time, though, until 2000, when the rapper LL
Cool J released an album called "G.O.A.T." "I'm the G.O.A.T., the greatest
of all time," he announced on the title track (pronouncing the word like
"goat" rather than spelling it out).
But a handful of sports fans were using "GOAT" even before the album's
release. A 1996 post in an early internet group for fans of the Orlando
Magic declared that Penny Hardaway, the basketball team's star, was "the
GOAT, Greatest of All Time."
I tracked down the author of that post, Rasan Rasch, who was a student at
Cornell University at the time and now works for New York University's
Digital Library Technology Services. Mr. Rasch explained that he had picked
up the acronym from a childhood friend from the Cambria Heights
neighborhood of New York City's borough of Queens. The friend, Billy Vanel,
had used it as early as 1991 to describe his favorite basketball player,
Magic Johnson.
Mr. Vanel, now a programmer at the accounting firm WeiserMazars, recalled
making a Magic Johnson mural for his bedroom out of newspaper and magazine
clippings, with "GOAT" spelled out across the top.
He and his friends who used the term were surprised when LL Cool J's album
came out nine years later. "We found it hysterical," Mr. Vanel told me via
email, adding that they figured the acronym must have traveled around
Queens, since the rapper hailed from the nearby Hollis neighborhood and
still had family there.
Regardless of how "GOAT" first circulated, it has a kind of contradictory
appeal, since it is so diametrically opposed to the traditional,
blameworthy use of "goat" in sports (likely a shortening of "scapegoat").
For those in the know, the acronymic version stands the old meaning of
"goat" on its head.
---

Here's the link to the 1996 Usenet post:

---
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sports.basketball.nba.orlando-magic/a2NXTJ6u_Fg/3FEgmz6I7G0J
1996 Feb. 4 Rasan Rasch alt.sports.basketball.nba.orlando-magic (Usenet
newsgroup)
Penny is the GOAT. Greatest of All Time
---

The OED3 entry for "GOAT" includes cites for the corporate entity name from
'92 and '96, but it doesn't have Rasch's Usenet post -- its earliest
example of the epithet in context is from 2000 (referring to LL Cool J).

--bgz

On Mon, Jul 3, 2023 at 11:48 AM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> In today’s Times, Kurt Streeter has this piece on the evolution of GOAT as
> an acronym for “Greatest Of All Time” in sports talk (and beyond—I’m sure
> legal scholars, logicians, literati, lutenists, laundrists, and even
> linguists are drawing up lists of candidates for this status at this very
> moment).
>
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/sports/tennis/greatest-athlete-of-all-time.html
>
> Evidently GOAT is No. 1 on the 2023 incarnation of the notorious list of
> banished words purveyed annually by Lake Superior State U.
>
> But I was struck by a side-comment Streeter offers concerning the older
> homonym, which some have suggested results in a pernicious ambiguity: the
> non-acronymic “goat”.  Streeter writes
>
> No doubt, being a goat isn’t what it used to be. In sports, it was once a
> terrible insult, a term of shame hung on athletes who snatched defeat from
> the jaws of victory. Greg Norman, <
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM5z_sCHNQw> otherwise known as the
> Shark, was a goat for coughing up a six-stroke lead in the final round of
> the 1996 Masters, a tournament he lost by five strokes.
> Before Norman, there was the Boston Red Sox’ grounder-through-the
> legs-at-the-worst-possible-World-Series-moment goat, Bill Buckne <
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18caPNisP2U>r.
> Need I say more?
>
> Yes, I’d say he does need to say more, in particular to distinguish the
> status of goat in team sports like baseball—yes, Buckner qualifies for his
> 1986 error (although some would say undeservedly, since the true goat was
> the Sox' catcher Rich Gedman whose misplay had let in the tying run just
> before), along with Fred “Bonehead” Merkle for the 1908 N.Y. Giants, Leon
> Durham and Steve Bartman respectively for the 1984 and 2003 Chicago Cubs,
> and so on—and in individual sports. Greg Norman cannot be a goat, nor can
> any tennis player (unless it’s in team competition for the Davis Cup and
> the like).
>
> I always assumed the lower-case pejorative “goat”, as antonym of “hero”,
> derived as a clipping from “scapegoat”, but the OED doesn’t support (or
> explicitly refute) this hypothesis:
>
> OED, s.v. “goat”, n.
>
> 6.  North American colloquial. A scapegoat.
>
> 8.  colloquial (North American Sport, originally and chiefly Baseball). (A
> name given to) the player whose mistake is believed to have lost his or her
> team the game, championship, etc.; a poor player, considered a hindrance to
> a team. Cf. to wear (the) goat's (also goat) horns at Phrases 5 <
> https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/79564?rskey=c0Wxd6&result=3&isAdvanced=false#eid1213315480
> >.
>
> Be that as it may, my own intuition supports the restriction of “goat” to
> team sports, as in sense 8.  So if Greg Norman blew his lead while playing
> in a crucial match for Australia in an international competition, costing
> his team the victory, he could be a goat, but not when he just blew his own
> chance to win the 1996 Masters.
>
> This is why I always connected “goat” to “scapegoat"—if you’re the goat,
> it’s because your team and its fans can hold you responsible, rightly or
> wrongly, for costing them the game/match/championship.
>
> LH
>
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> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org