While at the safari parkJake to StarrySpark: "Don't let me get your goat."
StarrySpark: (Silence...Blink...Blink...Wheels in head turning....) This is another of your crazy sayings isn't it. Like that, "Let me put a bug in your ear" thing?
Jake: Yes... It is another idiom. The phrase originated in the US and is first seen in print in 1909, in a fanciful story about a burst water pipe.
That's in the US newspaper, the Stevens Point Daily Journal, Wisconsin, May 1909:
"Wouldn't that get your goat? We'd been transferring the same water all night from the tub to the bowl and back again."
StarrySpark: Why do you know that?
Jake: I preparing for next year's "National Junior Honor Society" function.
