English Translation
What are you trying to do? Drive me insane?
I’ve spent a little time looking around for this idiom: faire tourner chèvre
- There is a wiktionnaire entry with no reference where the information comes from.
- There are several similar phrases with other verbs, ie, faire devenir chèvre, in reliable dictionaries
- On duckduckgo, search of this term on the websites in French or English mostly turns up dictionaries, only a few people actually using the phrase.
- There are only two sentences on reverso using this phrase.
This website shows a couple interesting charts of usage. In “Fréquence d’apparition du mot « faire tourner chèvre » dans le journal Le Monde depuis 1945“, usage of this term in Le Monde was between 2001 and 2003, peaking in 2002.
There is a second chart, Évolution historique de l’usage du mot « faire tourner chèvre » depuis 1800, that usage started in the 70s, bobbled around until the early 2000s and then increased.
At this point, this phrase is on my list to recognize in case I run into some old hippie. I don’t plan to use it;
Maybe this was some slang term that started in the 70s but didn’t make it into the dictionary (yet)? Is there anyone here that has ever heard or used this term? Merci d’avance.