[Ads-l] GOATS and goats

[Barretts Mail]

FWIW, the HDAS has a number of meanings for “goat,” including “scapegoat; butt” which has a 1910 citation from Dickson’s Baseball Dictionary: 'No more for me, I’ve quit being the “goat.”'

This is preceded by a 1900 citation for a military academy cadet who is the last in his class. 

Benjamin Barrett (he/his/him)
Formerly of Seattle, WA

> On Jul 3, 2023, at 09:33, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> 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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