Meaning
To annoy, irritate or exasperate someone, whether through a single incident or a steady drip of small provocations. Informal in register; American in origin but fully naturalized in British English, and generally reserved for everyday vexations rather than serious grievances. Informal and usually light-hearted, suited to nagging annoyances rather than genuine harm. Regional use: General English (American in origin).
Origin
The idiom is American and surfaces abruptly in the early twentieth century. Life in Sing Sing (1904), a book about the New York prison, records 'goat' as slang for anger, and The Phrase Finder locates the first print use of the full phrase in the Stevens Point Daily Journal of May 1909 ('Wouldn't that get your goat?'); Etymonline dates the expression to 1908. British adoption was quick but self-conscious: Galsworthy's novel The White Monkey (1924) has a character remark on the expression's novelty, and The Times in 1925 cited it as typically American. Why a goat should mean temper is unexplained. The often-repeated story that goats were stabled with racehorses as calming companions, so that stealing a rival's goat would spoil its chances, is dismissed by The Phrase Finder as having no supporting evidence; Etymonline likewise calls such explanations fanciful and offers only tentative alternatives, such as the French expression 'prendre sa chevre' and the theft of goats kept as military or naval mascots.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- don't let it get your goat
- got his goat
- really gets my goat
Usage Examples
- People who stop dead in the middle of a crowded pavement really get my goat.
- It got her goat that the colleague who missed every deadline lectured the office about time management.
- Don't let the hecklers get your goat; they are fishing for a reaction.