goatishness

They call it The Great Experiment, and their secret laboratory reports are, I am told, full of alleged parallels, linguistic, cultural and biological, between goatishness and left-handedness -- proof they say of their common origins and potential unity.

Sinister 2007

Always fussy about his food, he was appalled to find his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began to taste much the same, and on occasion he would find himself nibbling absently at his bedsheets or old newspapers, and come to his senses with a start, guilty and shamefaced at this further evidence of his progress away from manhood and towards -- yes -- goatishness.

The Satanic Verses Rushdie, Salman 1967

Nobody who has not kept a goat can have any notion of how many different kinds of mischief a goat can get into, without seeming to try, either, but merely by following the impulses of its own goatishness.

Boy Life Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells William Dean Howells 1878

"Deft and understated, the novel grants Morris his full complexity: He has the epistolary ire of Bellow's Herzog and the goatishness of Roth's Zuckerman, but Morris is more tender and bemused than they, clear-eyed in his failings and wistful in his losses."

canada.com Top Stories 2010

"Deft and understated, the novel grants Morris his full complexity: He has the epistolary ire of Bellow's Herzog and the goatishness of Roth's Zuckerman, but Morris is more tender and bemused than they, clear-eyed in his failings and wistful in his losses."

canada.com Top Stories 2010