Horse Raing

G – Greenlit, Get someone’s goat – Get there with the olives -Spanish at end of meal –Surviving historical anachronisms

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Greenlit or giving something the green light, barely scrapes into this theme since you would think that it’s not so hard to figure out – after all the traffic-lighting system has spread even further than the road traffic indicators with which we are all only too familiar. The reason it has made it into the blog is that it is not road, but railway signals that originated the coloured signalling.

Today greenlit has a special resonance with the movie industry since movies have so many hurdles to jump before they are greenlit to go ahead but green-lighting is used for all sorts of projects in many industries.

There were many iterations of signalling on the railways before at least the colours were nailed down by international agreement, however, the semaphore signal (pictured above) was almost universally adopted in Britain – the birthplace of steam railways, by 1870. The position of the arm had meanings from, Safe to Proceed, and Stop to Warning and although there continued to be an argument about the positions and meanings (read more here) the coloured lights produced by filters moving in front of a lamp at one end of the semaphore arm, were quickly settled on. The lights meant that the signals worked at night too. Lamps-only signals have largely replaced semaphores in many parts of the world.

Railway semaphore signal. (2023, February 7). In Wikipedia.

The coloured lights, at least the red and green, moved over to road traffic lights fairly smoothly, although it took a while for universal agreement on the Amber warning phase. (See here)

Get Someone’s Goat…

Unlike greenlit, the origins of this phrase are not at all obvious! One might imagine from the current usage – To Make Someone Angry- that this refers to the natural consequence of the theft of a goat however the true origin is more bizarre – although it still involves the theft of hapless goats.    Goats are said to have a calming effect on horses and race horses are notoriously high-strung, so owners might put a companionable goat in the stall of a racehorse on the night before a race. Naturally, if a rival stole the goat and the horse was consequentially over-frisky, the owner would be very angry…

These are Greek not Spanish olives, taken by myself in 2020

Get There with the Olives…

Sometimes, olives are served at the end of a Spanish meal and so someone who “get’s there with the olives” is arriving very late!

Lastly – the links to Cant “G” languages courtesy of Wikipedia…