My professor is a goat!

John… I hate to break it to you, but apparently, professors are goats. Although I have to say, you’ve managed to conceal the horns quite well. No I’m just kidding (clearly), but in Spain, it is often said that teachers, mothers, or just the random guy walking down the street are goats! Next time your mom starts dancing in the kitchen, drives aggressively, or asks you to wake up before 8am on a Saturday, tell her she’s a goat and see how it goes over. Or, if you want to get fancy, “estás como una cabra.” She probably wouldn’t really appreciate it.

If you told her she was nuts would that maybe be a little bit more acceptable?         

“Estar como una cabra” is just saying that something is crazy, out of hand, not thinking or acting clearly, etc. In English, we’d say it’s nuts.

This time, I actually tried this one out. My roommate was telling me about a project her professor is making them do, so I told her he was like a goat. She looked at me. Then she just laughed. Really hard. “A goat? He’s a goat? Why would he be a goat?” I told her that’s what they would have told her in Spanish, but really he’s just nuts. She still couldn’t get over the goat thing.

So I started thinking, honestly, a goat makes a lot more sense than nuts. What’s so crazy about nuts? They’re objects. They’re usually just simple shapes. They can’t move. They’re boring colors. If you ask me, nuts are pretty darn boring. At least goats live and breathe. They at least move and do funny, crazy things. And sometimes they do do crazy things.

This one to me really made me think about where idioms can come from. I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where “nuts” came from. Why did we take such a simple, boring object, and decide we were going to use it to describe something crazy?

Weird what we do with language. Even weirder that we understand it.

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3 Responses to My professor is a goat!

  1. Phoebe Canagarajah says:

    I have never questioned why we say something is “nuts”. I should have, because it really doesn’t make any sense. It does make sense to say someone is a goat. In general, the English language is unusual, especially when you compare it with other languages like Spanish.

  2. Brigh Desjardins says:

    That’s so funny! I never really thought about calling someone “nuts” either. It doesn’t make sense at all…maybe I’ll start calling people “goats” instead.

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