[Ads-l] GOATS and goats

[Betty Birner]

The acronym GOAT also appears repeatedly in the 1996 novel Infinite Jest, in which it is used to describe a young woman with whom the speaker is besotted.




-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On Behalf Of Ben Zimmer
Sent: Monday, July 3, 2023 11:34 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: GOATS and goats

External Email. Think before you click or reply.

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:

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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:

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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-a
> ll-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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>
>
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>

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