Holy Cow!

by Boze Hadleigh

  “Kidnapper” was first recorded in 1678 and originated as criminal slang (kid didn’t always mean solely a goat or a child). Napper was already an established term for a thief, from the verb to nap or steal—related to the still-current to nab (to seize something or catch someone). When first described in print, kidnappers were men who illegally and by force secured laborers to toil in plantations in British colonies in North America and elsewhere.

  The verb to kidnap was first recorded four years later, in 1682, likely as a back-formation, on the logical assumption that what kidnappers do is kidnap. The subsequent broader definition of kidnapping—beyond shanghaiing laborers—came later. As did Robert Louis Stevenson’s seagoing novel Kidnapped, in 1886.

  Getting Someone’s Goat

  Because goats were long thought to have a calming effect on horses, they were sometimes stabled with high-strung race horses, especially at an unfamiliar race track. Trying to crush a competing favorite’s chances of winning was easier than today; a traditional ploy was sneaking into a targeted stable to steal the goat away. When the horse’s owner found out somebody had gotten his goat, he was furious. (Today, someone whose goat is gotten is more likely to be frustrated or upset—unless a race or money is involved.)

  Some say the phrase didn’t originate with horse racing. One alternative is the French phrase prendre la chevre, to take the goat, meaning to take a person’s final resource (e.g., someone who’s left with just a goat after losing a more valuable cow, horse or pig). Others claim the phrase derives from goatee, a pointy chin beard resembling a billy goat’s, often called a “goat” in the 1800s. Pulling, or getting, the goat could obviously irritate its owner.

  An early written example occurs in a 1910 letter from Jack London: “Honestly, I believe I’ve got Samuels’ goat! He’s afraid to come back.” That usage reveals fear. Currently, the phrase evinces anger, as in “That really gets my goat.”

  Scapegoat

  This ancient concept dates back to the ancient Hebrews. It was Moses who decided that for the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) two goats should be led to the tabernacle’s altar where the high priest would draw lots: one goat for God, one for Azazel, a desert demon. The first goat would be sacrificed. The second would, by confession, be symbolically laden with the people’s sins of the past year and sent into the wilderness, carrying said sins away. Ironic that the demon’s goat was the one that had a chance of survival. Cruelly ironic that in the Common Era Jews were often made scapegoats by Christians and, more recently, Muslims.

  Horn of Plenty

  In Greek mythology Zeus was suckled as an infant by a goat nymph named Amalthea (meaning tender). When he became the chief god, Zeus honored Amalthea by placing her image among the stars as Capricorn (the Goat). He also borrowed one of her sizeable horns and made it into a cornucopia, a horn of plenty that was perpetually full with food and drink for its owners. Cornucopias have long been a symbol—and decoration—associated with Thanksgiving.

  Pan was a Greek demigod, patron of herds and flocks, forests and wildlife. He often played the Pan-pipes and was half-man, half-goat. When people heard his eerie music they were sometimes overcome by a sudden fear and confusion called panic.

  Goat. . .

  Interestingly, goat in Britain is slang for a dullard or stupid person, in the US for a lecherous man—and an old goat presumably for a dirty old man. Why the goat was chosen from all barnyard animals to represent lechery or stupidity isn’t clear. Some sources say lechery because the male exudes a primitive musky odor. Some say stupidity because of the caprine habit of mindless butting, others because goats will eat anything, including tin cans (isn’t that called recycling?).

  Goat is also used for one who takes the blame (see Scapegoat), as in “Don’t make me the goat!”

  A goat-antelope is a naturally occurring ruminant that combines characteristics of goats and antelopes. Goatfish is a North American name for red mullet, and a goat moth is so-called because its caterpillar gives off a goatlike smell!

  Goatsucker is another name for nightjar, a nocturnal insectivorous bird with a call that reminds some people of a goat’s bleat. (A go-away bird is a long-tailed African bird whose call purportedly sounds like the words “go away.”) And goat’s beard is a dandelion-like plant with slender grasslike leaves that resemble, what else, a billy goat’s beard or . . . goatee.

  The End of One’s Tether

  In the Middle Ages—aren’t you glad we live in the age of anesthesia?—grazing animals such as goats were frequently tethered to a post, keeping them within a restricted area. An animal was usually content so long as it could graze, but once it grazed up to the end of its tether and couldn’t access greener pastures, frustration, anger, and despair set in. Also known as reaching the end of one’s rope.

  Sheep and Lambs

  It doesn’t take much ovine observation to see why people called sheep are easily led or influenced. Sheep are among the least resistant, most flock-oriented animals. Yet sheepish, applied to a human, means embarrassed from shyness or shame, and making sheep’s eyes at somebody is amorous in a foolish way that doesn’t necessarily entail embarrassment.

  There are black sheep in every flock is the 19th-century expression that birthed the phrase black sheep of the family. It arose from prejudice against the color black and standing out, and indicated that there are miscreants in every family, group, community, and congregation (ovine references are religious staples).

  Prior to the 1830s English punishments for crimes were unduly harsh, resulting in the expression may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Stealing a sheep incurred the death penalty, as did stealing various smaller animals, including a lamb. So a thief reckoned he might as well steal the larger animal and get more meat, as it entailed the same risk. A more modern expression meaning the same thing is in for a penny, in for a pound—that is, may as well go all the way.

  Why do people count sheep to (try to) fall asleep? Because ovine flocks are typically the biggest, with the most individual members to count.

  A flock of sheep, if human, is a bunch of go-along-ers.

  A biblical saying is to separate the sheep from the goats, representing separating good people from bad people, reflecting the anti-goat bias of ancient times (see Scapegoat).

  Condoms used to be known as sheepskins because they were made from the intestinal membrane of a lamb.

  To wait two shakes of a lamb’s tail is to wait a very short while.

  Meek as a lamb speaks for itself. A sacrificial lamb is someone unfairly made to pay for others’ mistakes or misdeeds. To go like a lamb to the slaughter connotes somebody facing their destruction docilely—the difference being that animals don’t know what awaits them.

  Wool. . .

  Dyed in the wool, a trade term used in English wool mills, was first recorded in 1579. Wool dyed before being treated retained its color far better than wool dyed after weaving (known as dyed in the piece). Eventually dyed in the wool stood for anything or anyone not easily altered by another process—including persuasion; the phrase is frequently used in a political context.

  Speaking of sheep’s clothing, the sneaky wolf in it goes way back, including Aesop’s fables and the Bible.

  Fleece, what sheep wear, got twisted into a verb meaning to monetarily overcharge someone. The implication was that if you were overcharged enough, it was like a sheep losing its fleece—or a person losing their shirt.

  Wool-gathering is indulgence in idle or aimless thought, such as a shepherd might do.

  Woolly can mean confused or vague, as in woolly thinking. Agatha Christie described her elderly sleuth Miss Marple as seeming woolly via her soft white hair and an absentminded air that masked detecting talents which outdid the police.

  A woolly bear is no cuddly teddy bear, but a big hairy caterpillar, particularly that of a tiger moth. It’s also the small hairy larva of a carpet beetle or museum beetle.

  Wool-sorters’ disease is a form of anthrax in humans that
causes pneumonia. (Anthrax is an ovine and bovine bacterial disease that affects the lungs and skin and can be transmitted to humans.)

  And Woolloomooloo is a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

  Bigwig

  Bigwig, for an important person, is now a less popular term than, say, a big cheese, the big enchilada, or the head honcho. However, the older term was literal, as an individual’s status was often conflated with the size of their wig—who had bigger ones than Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before they lost their heads? Wigs were made of various materials, including wool, horse hair, and human hair. In France and England, thieves (who’d sometimes resorted to theft only to avoid starvation, hence the eventual French Revolution) often drew near their rich victims from behind, then pulled the big wig down and forward over the aristocrat’s eyes to distract them and gain time while robbing them. In more democratic times, the phrase to pull the wool over someone’s eyes merely indicates fooling or deceiving them.

  Mutton, Chops

  Mutton is the mature flesh of sheep, as food. The phrase mutton dressed up as lamb derides an older woman dressed like a younger one. A man’s mutton chop whiskers resemble a meat chop, narrow at the top and wide and rounded below.

  Muttonhead is an old word for a stupid or dull person. Its abbreviation, mutt, eventually acquired a canine application.

  A mutton bird is a long-winged seabird so named because its cooked flesh recalls the taste of mutton (not chicken).

  Chops are a human’s or animal’s mouth, jaws, or cheeks. They’re also what one licks in anticipation of or after eating something delicious. Chops is related to the 16th-century chap, the lower jaw or half of the cheek, particularly of a pig when used for food.

  Chops are also the technical skill of a rock or jazz musician.

  To bust one’s chops is to put forth extra effort. To bust someone else’s chops is to nag or criticize them.

  Rats

  “I smell a rat.” This phrase denoting suspicion without concrete evidence is due to the fact that a human may not be able to smell a rat, but a dog with its far keener sense of smell can. In not so merry olde England rats were a major problem. When a dog unexpectedly began sniffing around a house or barn, its owner was wont to say that it looked like the dog smelled a rat. The proof usually came later.

  Calling someone a rat has been an international pejorative for millennia, rats being among the most despised and feared of animals for health, economic, and aesthetic reasons. Gangster-film star James Cagney made a 1930s catchphrase of you dirty rat, often referring to an informer (or stool pigeon). Prison slang had already made rat, dirty rat, rat fink—also cornered like a rat—common in-house terms.

  Apart from ratty, rat can prefix or be added to most anything dirty or unpleasant, like a rathole or the rat race. In Britain a ratbag is somebody unpleasant or disliked, and rat-arsed (-assed, in the US) means very drunk.

  A rat pack is a group of aggressive associates or close-knit friends. The original Hollywood rat pack comprised Humphrey Bogart and his drinking buddies, including Frank Sinatra, who later wanted to marry Bogart’s widow, Lauren Bacall. In the US rat can specify someone associated with a given place, such as a mall rat or gym rat.

  Ratlines are a series of small rope lines attached to a sailing ship’s shrouds (the rigging ropes that help support the mast or topmast) like ladder rungs, for rigging or climbing.

  A rat snake is a harmless—to humans—constrictor that squeezes and eats rats and other small mammals. A rat-kangaroo is a small Australian marsupial that resembles a rat, has long hind legs, and hops.

  A hair rat or hair bun rat is indirectly familiar to anyone who’s seen 1940s movies. Going back centuries, these sausage-shaped coiffeur-shapers were often ten inches long. A brunette one allegedly resembled a rat. A woman’s hair was wound over the flexible rat, yielding the puffy yet sculpted hairstyles that were especially popular during the Victorian era and the ’40s.

  “Drat!”—a pet exclamation of W. C. Fields—does not, as urban legend has it, stand for damn rat, but is a 19th-century contraction of God rot, highly blasphemous at the time.

  Topo Gigio

  Arguably the most popular guest on TV’s long-running and star-studded The Ed Sullivan Show was Topo Gigio, the Italian mouse who appeared some 50 times between 1963 and ’71 when the variety series ended. Sullivan believed that his banter with the adorable mouse—topo; Gigio is a nickname for Luigi/Louis—warmed his semifrozen image. Gigio clearly had a crush on Sullivan, bashfully flirting with him, eventually cooing “I love you, Eddie,” and wangling a kiss.

  Ten inches tall with doe-like eyes cut from foam rubber, Topo Gigio could talk, walk, roll his eyes, wiggle his ears and toes, and gesture—all at the same time. He was created by Maria Perego Caldura of Milan, who performed all his movements except for his hands and arms, which two other also unseen puppeteers controlled while a fourth individual supplied the cuddly rodent’s voice.

  Before Sullivan, Gigio made an Italian movie (later released in the US as The Magic World of Topo Gigio). During Sullivan he was marketed as toys and trinkets, afterward appearing in cartoons, doing world tours—he was a smash in Japan—and starring in his own children’s TV show in Italy, where he still performs at festivals.

  Build a Better Mousetrap

  Back in the day, mousetraps were far more important than they are now. This expression about making a major improvement to a product (or method) likely originated with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essayist-poet-philosopher-lecturer was a leader of the Hindu-inspired American Transcendentalist movement, which purposed personal transcendence and the philosophy God-is-everywhere-including-within-you.

  Self-publicizing writer Elbert Hubbard, renowned in the early 20th century for his “pithy sayings,” claimed the mousetrap phrase as his own. Eventually he was contradicted by Sarah Yule, whose 1889 anthology Borrowings quoted Emerson: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

  Yule declared she’d jotted down the quote during an Emerson lecture in 1871.

  Today the phrase is invariably used in a business context, and has been shortened to: “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

  Bats and Batty

  Interesting that mental illness only afflicts humans, yet some animals are considered crazier than others. Sometimes on account of a habit like sleeping upside down and only coming out at night. Isn’t that batty? So a crazy or nutty person is deemed batty. The term was reinforced by a famous and controversial book, Treatise on Madness, that well predated Freud, by one William Battie (1704–1776), a psychiatrist. And by the famous case of a barrister from Spanish Town, Jamaica, later certified insane in London in 1839, named Fitzherbert Batty.

  Bats sound asleep in a belfry—a bell tower or steeple—when bells are suddenly loudly rung tend to become madly agitated (who wouldn’t?).

  Interesting too that in the centuries before books became widely and cheaply available, slang expressions that were commonly spoken didn’t necessarily find their way into print. For instance the word batty doesn’t appear to have seen print until about 1900.

  Like a Bat Out of Hell

  Among mammals, only bats can fly. (In German bat is Fledermaus, incorporating the word for mouse.) Some 2,400 years ago, Aristophanes mentioned a bat from hell in his play The Birds. Because they sleep in dark caves and spaces by day and swoop out at night, often startlingly fast, bats have long been associated with “hell” or the underworld.

  The discovery and subsequent publicity attending the vampire bat, found in many tropic regions, especially Latin America, added to bats’ hellish reputation. Vampire bats suck and subsist on blood after piercing a victim with razor-like incisors (while sucking, they pee, to render their bodies light enough to fly). Dracula and Batman—and to a lesser extent plays like The Bat and operas like Die Fledermaus�
�have given this unique creature a permanently extended lease on cultural life.

  Speed was the point of this expression. For example in George Patullo’s 1912 novel The Sheriff of Badger: “Whenever I have any (money) and get to town, it goes like a bat out of hell.” As the 1900s wore on, the expression acquired a connotation of speed driven by fear—as opposed to, say, spending money quickly.

  Bat Conservation International reports that one species of bat flies as fast as 60 miles per hour. All bats are equipped with echolocation, which enables them to fly unhesitantly through complete darkness. Neat, huh?

  (Though bats can sleep and hibernate upside down, to give birth or go to the bathroom they must hang by their thumbs right-side-up.)

  Badger. . .

  Dachshund means badger dog in German, for so-called wiener dogs were specifically bred, via their distinctive shape, to dig badgers out of their setts or burrows. Members of the weasel family, badgers are nocturnal omnivores, usually black and gray with a white-striped head.

  The cruel pastime of badger-baiting, illegal in the UK since 1830, involved dogs luring a badger from its sett and ripping it to pieces.

  Bald as a badger doesn’t make sense—they don’t look bald, unlike a coot—until one completes the original phrase: bald as a badger’s bum (UK bum is US buttocks or buns). Not that a badger’s bum looks bald either, but it was once widely believed that shaving-brush bristles were plucked from that particular venue.

  As for how that unobtrusive animal became associated with the verb to badger or repeatedly nag or bother someone, that involved another “sport,” in which dogs were unleashed upon a badger that had been put in an upturned barrel. After dragging it out, a non-humane human placed the bloodied badger back in the barrel so the dogs could drag it out again, and again if need be, until it was an unrecognizable pulp.

  Weasel and Ferret

  The weasel, a small, slender carnivore related to stoats, ferrets, and minks, has an undeservedly nasty reputation. A human weasel is cunning and treacherous, weaseling his way out of deceitful situations of his own making.