Paul Kengor: Since when are GOATS the greatest?

One of the weirdest things to hit the sports and pop-culture lexicon is this strange acronym GOAT. It’s a real headscratcher. Frankly, it’s dumb, and it needs to go away.

You probably know what I’m talking about, given the sad saturation of social media. This GOAT thing stands for Greatest Of All Time, and is suddenly being vigorously applied to various sports figures by vacuous media types.

For instance, Tom Brady is declared the GOAT among quarterbacks. The Steel Curtain defense is declared the GOAT among defensive lines. The Steelers team of the 1970s is declared the GOAT among NFL dynasties.

Of course, all are indeed the greatest in their respective areas. Fine. But they cannot be dubbed the GOAT. Why? Because a “goat,” in sports especially, has always been precisely the opposite — i.e., a choker, a loser.

From classic literature to modern times, goats are dubious. Even the Bible (Matthew 25:32-33) states: “He will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” In literature, men who are goats are scoundrels, lechers.

Goats, of course, are not the greatest. Most peculiar about this whole misbegotten enterprise, the term “goat” had never been used to suggest anything in sports but bad. Why are we suddenly allowing faceless, clueless Twitter millennials to impose on the rest of us their embarrassing illiteracy?

Illiteracy? Oh, yes.

Here’s the reality: When you create an acronym, you don’t include prepositions. Period, end of story.

Allow me to illustrate with some obvious cases:

The USA, the United States of America, is not the USOA. Or take a couple examples from the pandemic: the National Institutes of Health is NIH, and the Centers for Disease Control is the CDC. According to the standards of our sinister GOAT people, they should be rechristened NIOH and CFDC.

Here’s one literally closer to the GOAT acronym. The term GATT refers to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It is not rendered GAOTAT. Obviously, you don’t include “on” and “and” in the GATT acronym. Or any acronym.

When did this silliness start? I don’t know. I recall being struck several years ago by the label SCOTUS, which was bastardized to stand for the Supreme Court of the United States, which I believe some guy with a popular court blog started butchering. Maybe it seemed more pronounceable than USSC, which would be customary and accurate.

Anyway, when some naïf blithely swimming with the cultural currents gullibly grins and asks you for the GOAT in baseball, throw him a curveball and instead name the equivalent of a legendary home-run hitter who struck out swinging at a ball in the dirt to lose the World Series. For basketball’s GOAT, go for the equivalent of a poor dude who twice missed the entire rim at the free-throw line to lose the NCAA championship by one point. Those are goats.

I offer this plea of desperation: By what anonymous authority is our language being twisted like this? They’re not merely breaking rules. They’re smashing them so badly that they’re turning choking goats into the greatest athletes ever. This is madness!

Can we please stop this ludicrous mess of an acronym?