G.O.A.T. vs. Goat: The Battle of Generational Slang

Back in the 1970s, calling somebody a goat was bad.  The word ‘goat’ was short for ‘scapegoat’ and generally meant ‘loser.’ It might have been a little bit before my time because it wasn’t part of my elementary school vernacular.   If another kid was a loser, we’d just call him a loser or something worse.  Even though we might never have used the word ‘goat’ to put losers in their place, we knew what it meant.  We had Charlie Brown to thank for that.

Maybe ‘goat’ was something our parents had said when they were younger, but I can’t ask them about that anymore. It must have at least been something that somebody had said to Charles Schultz, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts starring Charlie Brown, because that’s where we saw ‘goat’ being used all the time. So for several generations, at least as far as I know, the word ‘goat’ meant ‘loser.’

Nowadays, when I hear youngsters (anybody who is 30 years younger than me) say the word ‘goat,’ they usually mean G.O.A.T.:  an acronym for Greatest Of All Time.  It’s usually in reference to sports, often football or basketball. The common arguments today are that Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T. of professional football and Michael Jordan is the G.O.A.T. in professional basketball, though youngsters today might make the claim that LeBron James is the G.O.A.T.

LeBron James?

Unfortunately, LeBron James claims himself to be the G.O.A.T., so that automatically excludes him from the argument.  If you have to call yourself the G.O.A.T., then you’re not the G.O.A.T.  Plus, LeBron James was the old version goat of the 2011 NBA championship series, where the underdog Dallas Mavericks defeated the heavily-favored Miami Heat, partially because LeBron James was at times outplayed by an athlete that very few people had heard of.  You can’t be the goat of a championship series and then also be the G.O.A.T.

Anyway, that’s not the point.

Back when I was reading the comic strip Peanuts every day in the 1970s and 1980s, we sports fans didn’t argue about who was the Greatest Of All Time.   We might have argued about who in our particular time period was the best, but even as teenagers, we knew that the athletic standards of the 1980s weren’t the same as those of the 1950s.  For one thing, all the footage of the 1950s was in black-and-white.  There was no way that athletes competing in black-and-white footage could compare with athletes in full color. 

Nowadays, all the footage of 1980s sporting events is grainy, so today’s youngsters must believe that there was no way the athletes of the previous century can be compared to today’s athletes whose highlights have been recorded in glorious HD (or whatever is even better than High Definition… I lose track of these things). 

Whenever the topic of G.O.A.T. comes up with the youngsters (it doesn’t happen that often), I have to mentally clarify which type of goat (or G.O.A.T.) we’re talking about. Thankfully, with writing, there’s little chance of misinterpretation. Charlie Brown might have seen himself as a goat, but the comic strip Peanuts is probably the Greatest Of All Time.

On the other hand, LeBron James might see himself as the Greatest Of All Time in basketball, but in reality he’s just a goa… record-breaking basketball player who will probably have a polarizing legacy.

But that’s for other bloggers and content creators to argue about.

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For more Dysfunctional Literacy , read…

Scrabble Makes New Dictionary Filled with Fake Words

Words Not To Say In Front Of My Kids

We Don’t Need A New Word For That

The Fake Word

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I’m going to take a page from LeBron James and call my novel The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy the G.R.O.A.T. (Greatest Romance Of All Time)!

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It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!

Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!

The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon and from the trunk of my car!