Geriatric OE

The weekly musing of a couple of Kiwis on their geriatric OE in The UK






Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Animal sayings...



What really gets my goat?

Well I’ll tell you.

People who walk along head down either reading, yes reading…how on earth anyone can concentrate on that while walking is beyond me…or txting on their phones. The ignorant folks expect everyone else to walk around them. I’ve stopped doing that. It is interesting to see the confused look on their faces when they find a person in their way.

 And how about thus one...

Yesterday a chap got onto the already crowded tub with a large pack on his back. Just about knocked the book I was reading out of my hand.
‘take you pack off and put it between your feet’ I said to him. ‘Big packs are a nuisance on a crowded train’
‘What?’ he answered, pulling one of his headphones off.
I repeated myself, and he just gave me what he must have thought was a dirty look and moved further into the carriage and turned sideways so that his bulky pack was just inches from the face of the woman sitting there.
Talk about pig ignorant.

Now there’s a phrase for you, I owner where it came from Hmmm didn’t have much luck as far as the origin goes, but the  meaning was certainly accurate.

Now how about the phrase I started with That’s right, getting on someones goat 

The dictionary definition of goat is 'a ruminant quadruped of the genus Capra'. What's that got to do with being angry? Given the meaning of 'get your goat', we might expect to find goat as a slang term meaning anger or annoyance. That meaning is recorded in the US book Life in Sing Sing, 1904, which goat is given as a slang term for anger.
The phrase originated in the US and the first entry in print that I can find comes from a fanciful story about a burst water pipe that was printed in the US newspaper The Stevens Point Daily Journal, May 1909:

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