An American Boxer in Paris - Did "Prendre la Chevre" Beget "Get My Goat"?

An American Boxer in Paris - 

Did "Prendre la Chevre" Beget "Get My Goat"?

In an earlier post, I surveyed the history of the English-language idiom, “Get My Goat,” and some of the cultural factors that may have influenced the development of the idiom.  

 (Getting Goats, Losing Goats, Stable Goats and Navy Goats - a History and Etymology of "Get My Goat")

The phrase first appeared in 1905.  Most of the early uses of the idiom are in boxing reports.  One of the earliest uses is in a Navy story, and one early use is in a Navy-boxing story.  Based on a close association between and among the Navy, boxing, and goats, it seemed plausible, if not likely, that the Navy could have been the ultimate origin of the phrase. 

When I put my piece together, however, did not mention one other, possible influence on the phrase.  I omitted any discussion of the similar French idiom, “prendre la chevre.”  Ben Zimmer mentioned the idiom briefly in Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast about “get my goat.” I also received a comment in the comments section of my earlier “Get My Goat,” post.

I admit it.  I should have mentioned the phrase; at least in the interest of completeness.  My bad. 

Prendre la Chevre

The French phrase, “prendre la chevre,” is a French idiom that means, to “lose one’s temper.”  As I understand it, the literal meaning of the phrase is, to “take the goat.”  Although the goat reference, and corresponding loss of temper, are similar on the surface, the allusion underlying the idioms are diametrically opposed.  In French, I lose my temper if I, “prendre la chevre,” – take the goat; whereas, in English, I lose my temper if someone else “prendres” my “chevre” – takes my goat.  The loss of temper in the idiom, “prendre la chevre,” also differs from the dominant sense that “get my goat” had during the early days of the idiom.  In many of the earliest uses of “get my goat,” it was used to indicate that a boxer had lost their will to fight; not that the boxer had become angry or lost their temper.

An English-French dictionary that mentions both idioms also seems to suggest that the two idioms do not have the same meaning: 

goat . . . U.S.: P: To get s.o.’s goat, irriter, exasperer, F: horripiler, qn; porter sur les nerfs a qn.  It gets my g., ca me fait rager, To lose one’s goat, se facher.

temper . . . To lose one’s temper . . . F: se facher tout rouge, prendre la chevre.

J. E. Mansion (Editor), Heath’s Standard French and English Dictionary, Part 2, English-French with Supplement (1955) (first published 1939), Bath, England, Pitman Press, pages 521 and 1290.

I would have given the French connection more weight if there had been a significant wave of French immigration in the years just prior to the emergence of “Get My Goat” in 1905.  The French expression apparently dates back to the 1600s[i], but “get my goat dates to 1905.  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both spent years in Paris without losing their goats.  The Marquis de Lafayette and Pierre L’Enfant came and went in the early days of the United States without leaving a goat trail.  French speakers lived among us, and around us, in Canada, Maine, and Louisiana, for hundreds of years, without taking our goats.  Generations of American academics learned French, studied in France, and sent French postcards home – all without getting our goats. 

In addition, the close association between and among the Navy, boxers, and goats just seemed so persuasive. 

It is also possible that the same impetus for coining the French idiom in 1675 resulted in the independent coining of the English-language expression in the United States, more than two hundred years later.  France, England and the United States all had long traditions of keeping goats with other livestock. 

It is also possible that one person, in the right place at the right time, used (or misused) the French expression, it caught someone’s attention, and the expression just took off.

It is possible that that person was in the Navy or was a boxer.

But how did boxers pick up the idiom in 1905?

Curious – I went back to the salt mines and found these tantalizing tid-bits.

An American Boxer in Paris

In 1905, just before “get my goat,” first appeared in print, American-style (or, I guess more properly, English-style) boxing enjoyed a sort of renaissance in France (the French having, previously, primarily engaged in La Savate, or kickboxing):

Boxing is gaining in favor in France.  A number of boxing matches have taken place recently in France, and others are scheduled.  Most of the fighters are Englishmen, the French not having as yet developed a really first-class man with the gloves.  Kid Lavigne, at one time a topnotcher in America, had a prosperous boxing school at Paris, though I believe for some reason he has given it up.  Several good English fighters give lessons in the French capital and are well patronized.  “Le Boxe” bids fair to become a permanent institution across the Channel.

The Washington Times (Washington DC), September 10, 1905, Sporting News, page 3, column 3.

American boxers had been running boxing schools in France since at least 1902: 

Kid McCoy[ii] is in Paris where he appears to be enjoying himself by telling Frenchmen that he is the greatest fighter in the world.  So smoothly has McCoy talked that Count Castellane[iii] is said to have expressed a willingness to back him against Jeffries or Fitzsimmons for $20,000.  If the Count will take the trouble to study pugilistic form and also consult a few American experts at the game, he may deem it advisable to keep his money in his inside pocket.  It is doubtful if McCoy could be dragged into a ring with either Jeffries or Fitz by a team of horses.

The Sun (New York), March 20, 1902, page 8, column 1.

Kid McCoy has rented a big gymnasium in the Champs Elysees, Paris, to teach the jeunesse dore of Paris the science of boxing, or “la boxe,” as it is called.  McCoy said:

“I am so far advanced in my calling that I am going to be a professor.  When a man has fought 269 battles, losing only three, he is entitled to a degree from the university of pugilism.

“My coming is part of the American invasion.   We can’t let Schwab and Morgan do all the invading.  I can’t buy up a monopoly of trying to teach boxing.  Mine will be a voluntary trust, and I will let in all who wish to learn to box.  I am the first American to teach boxing in France.

“It will be worth more to France than all the commercial colleges the government intends to establish in the United States.  If ever France hopes to obtain revenge for Metz, the young Frenchmen must learn how to box.  I’ll make strenuous men of them.  I do not mean to retire from the ring.  The Count de Castellane will be my pupil.”

Voila le garcon, McCoy.  Vive le Kid!

The Butte Inter-Mountain (Montana), March 11, 1902, page 8, column 3.

McCoy was back in the US by August:

McCoy Wants to Fight Jeffries

Kid McCoy, who returned from Europe recently, has announced that he is anxious to secure a fight with Jim Jeffries, and that unless he can do so is out of the ring for good. . . . McCoy has been automobiling in France.

The Butte Inter-Mountain, August 12, 1902, Evening Edition, page 8, column 6.

But McCoy was not the only American teaching boxing in France in the early 1900s:

Kid Lavigne Has Returned to America

Has Had All He Wants on Other Side of the Atlantic.

New York, Sept. 9. – After a stay of more than two years in France, “Kid” Lavigne, once the world’s champion light-weight fighter, has returned to America.  He says that he has had all that he wants of the other side, and that hereafter he will remain on his native heath.

Lavigne, who is in as fine shape as the night he defeated Joe Walcott at Maspeth, relates an advanced idea of the manly art of self-defense in France.

Lavigne conducted a school of boxing while in Paris, and in it he taught many of the French nobility and aristocracy much about the American style of boxing.  According to him the national sport of La Savate has taken a back seat and the American and English game has come to the fore.

The Salt Lake Tribune (Utah), September 10, 1905, Sporting Section, page 4.

Evening Statesman (Walla Walla, Washington), February 9, 1905, page 3.

Conclusion

I am not sure that we can draw any conclusion, with any degree of certainty.  The Navy did have a long tradition of keeping goats, and several of the earliest appearances of “get my goat” in print related to the Navy, and to Navy boxers.  

So, clearly it must have come from the Navy!

The French have a very similar idiom.

So, clearly it must have come from the France!

But, at least two American boxers did run boxing schools in France in the years immediately preceding the emergence of the idiom, “get my goat.”  They would certainly have had the opportunity to learn the French idiom, “prendre la chevre,” and to bring it back to the United States in the form of, “get my goat.”  

So, clearly it must have come from Boxing!

The world is an interesting, and complicated place; and language reflects that.

"So, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!"

Still looking for that smoking gun; but the Navy connection seems plausible.

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[i] The comment on my earlier post cites a French dictionary that dates the expression, “prendre la chevre,” to 1675.

[ii] On December 20, 1905 (just weeks after “get my goat” first appeared in print), Kid McCoy advised Jack O’Brien to “Step on the old man’s feet. . . . His feet are in the cornfield, and you will get his goat more by keeping on top of them all the time than by stabbing him in the food hopper.” Los Angeles Herald, December 17, 1906, page 6 (see my earlier post).

[iii] The Count’s Countess was Anna Gould, daughter of American financier, Jay Gould.

Wildcats and Wildcatters - the Very Long History of a "New York Minute"

Wildcats and Wildcatters - 

the Very Long History of a "New York Minute"

“I’d make love to you in a New York minute; and take my Texas time doin’ it.”

          In a New York Minute, by Ronnie McDowell

The expression “Everything is bigger in Texas!” may have originated in New York.

(See my earlier post, “Everything is Bigger in Texas” – from New York City?!?!) 

Conversely, the expression, “in a New York minute,” denoting a very short time (suggestive of the perceived (or real) fast-pace of life in The Big Apple), may have first achieved widespread use in Texas.  Barry Popik’s online etymology dictionary, The Big Apple, lists several early attestations to the expression from Texas; the earliest from 1954:  

“Betty Jean Bird of the Pirate Club has what she claims the smallest French poodle in the nation . . . It’s no bigger than  New York minute and that’s only thirty seconds.”

San Antonio (TX) Light, November 1954, page 5F, col. 5, 8,

The earliest attestation for “New York minute,” listed in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), is also from Texas, from 1967.[i]     

But although the expression may owe its current level of familiarity to Texas, the expression may be older – MUCH older; and probably not from Texas.  Although the written record is very sparse, the expression, a “New York minute,” appears in print at a rate of about once every forty years, or so, dating back to 1870.   

Although the expression may not be from Texas, it may not be a coincidence that the expression found its way there.  The earliest known use of a “New York minute” is from 1870, in Titusville, Pennsylvania.  The Oil Creek valley, that runs through Titusville, Pennsylvania, was the epicenter of the Pennsylvania oil rush that started in 1859 and peaked in about 1891.  But just as oil production waned in western Pennsylvania, the opening of the Corsicana oil field in 1894, and the Spindletop strike in 1901, sparked the Texas Oil Boom.  

Did oil field workers, also known as wildcatters, migrating from the oil fields of Pennsylvania to the oil fields of Texas, bring the expression, a “New York minute,” to Texas?  I do not know.  But I do know that the earliest example of a “New York minute” that I could find in print, comes from a Titusville, Pennsylvania newspaper, and involves an actual wildcat and a former wildcatter.  The story was also picked up in several other regional newspapers that I could find (and presumably many more), which gave the expression the opportunity to reach a wider audience (many of them wildcatters), if it was not already a well-known expression in the region.  The phrase is used in the article without explanation, which may suggest that the phrase was already familiar to the readers:

A Wildcat Under the Dutchman’s Bed.

West Hickory, besides being noted for its big wells, dry holes and rattlesnakes, has a new and charming feature of attraction in the vast number of wildcats or catamounts, that are to be found in the neighboring forest, and which make night hideous with their mellifluous notes when on a forage.

Near the headwaters of West Hickory creek lives an humble and honest agriculturist by the name of Adam Goodman who, after engaging in the perilous occupation of an oil operator on the creek, reformed and opened a keno bank, and with the accumulation of several weeks retired from business, out of the back window (as a policeman entered the front) and purchasing a few acres of soil began to farm it. . . .

[O]n Saturday night last . . . he was awakened by an unearthly howl, a crash of glass and the striking of a “heavy something” upon his breast.  At first he thought it must be a horrible nightmare, caused by too rich viands. . . .  All was quiet, and finally thinking it must have been an oil creek bedbug on a raid, he dismissed the subject, and was preparing to settle into an all night’s sleep, when a scratching was heard beneath the bead.  Hastily rising, he jerked on his unmentionables, and dropping on all fours, began to claw beneath the bed after the midnight intruder.

He found it, and in one-fourth of a New York minute all the clothes that were upon him would not have made a bib for a china doll.  He finally found himself in the corner partly scalped, with his lower limbs looking as though he had been through a wool carding machine; while at this moment with a spit and a growl, a catamount disappeared through the open window.  Such is the simple tale of Adam Goodman.  He now desires to emigrate to some spot where the insects are not so troublesome.  His farm is a good one, but he cannot stand the cats.

The Bloomfield Times (New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania), November 15, 1870, page 2 (emphasis added); also, The Post (Middleburg, Pennsylvania, September 15, 1870, page 1 (crediting the Titusville Herald); a condensed version appeared in the Urbana Union (Urbana, Ohio), September 21, 1870, page 4.

[See Update below for an additional early example - from 1872.]

After going into hiding for nearly forty years (under a Pennsylvania farmer’s bed, perhaps?), the phrase appeared again; this time in Vermont.  In 1908, the Middlebury (Vermont) Register reported the goings-on at the Middlebury “village meeting”:

A motion to pay $300 in addition to the $200 already voted by the town was proposed.  It did not take more than a couple of New York minutes to decide that the motion should go on the table.

Middlebury Register, March 27, 1908, page 1 (emphasis added).

While both of these early uses of “New York minute” seem to unambiguously reflect the modern sense of the phrase, a “very short period of time,” two other early uses of the expression, from New York newspapers, are not so clear.  But they may, nevertheless, reflect a general awareness of the existence of the phrase at the time.  I will let you be the judge.

In 1890, The New York Sun published a humorous story about a man so engrossed in reading The Sun, that he absent-mindedly slips his lit cigar into his coat pocket, instead of his handkerchief:

About two New York minutes slipped away into eternity.  Then the air was rent with a sudden war whoop, the sitter made a clean jump of six feet, and a second after getting his equilibrium he was tearing off his coat tails and dancing all kinds of jigs.

The Sun, September 7, 1890, page 15, column 5.

Did it literally take two minutes, literally in New York City, for him to feel the burn – or did it take two, quick, proverbial “New York minutes”?

In 1915, Saks placed several advertisements in The Sun for Men’s suits:

The difference between this and most clothing sales is too important for you to overlook.  This is not one of those over-advertised philanthropic sales of overlots, designed to help out some unfortunate and mysterious clothing manufacturer.  In the first place, we made these suits ourselves, and inasmuch as we keep our assortments at par right up to sale time, you get the double benefit of greatly reduced prices on selections that are right up to the New York minute.  But do it Now!

The Sun, July 14, 1915, page 3.

Were the suits as “up to the minute,” as one would expect for New York Fashions, or were they so “up to date,” as to be a mere “New York minute” away from perfect up-to-datedness? 

Then the phrase went into hiatus for another forty years, before popping up again in Texas, in the 1950s. 

The decades-long gaps in the written record are inexplicable.  Perhaps the phrase percolated through the years in an oral tradition.  Perhaps the expression traveled with Pennsylvania wildcatters who followed the oil business to Texas at the end of the nineteenth century.  Perhaps the expression was reinvented, independently, every three or four decades, by like-minded people who viewed New York City with the same jaundiced (or astute) eye.  We may never know.

It just goes to show how any figure of speech, if neglected or unused, can be gone – in a New York Minute – only to reappear again – a Texas-sized period of time later.

The New York Sun, July 14, 1915.

UPDATE - April 28, 2016:

I found one more early example of "New York Minute" in a newspaper in Kansas from 1872:

On Wednesday last, the City Council appointed E. G. Russell, City Marshal, vice C. Crumb resigned.  Ezra says to evil doers, beware, or he'll "snail them within half of a New York minute.

The Osage County Chronicle (Burlingame, Kansas), February 29, 1872, page 3.

 If you can figure out what, "snail them," means, let me know. 


Update - June 2, 2017:

The prehistory of "a New York minute" is even older than I understood when I wrote this piece more than two years ago.  The precursor idiom, "a York minute," dates to at least the 1820s, and refers to Toronto, Ontario (then known as York, Upper Canada) and not New York City. See my new post, In a Toronto Minute? The Pre-History of "In a New York Minute".

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[i] Michael Quinion, WorldWideWords.org.