He was made the scapegoat for the team Premium

A column which discusses english phrases, terms and grammar.

The word ‘scapegoat’ can be used both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, it is normally used to refer to someone who gets blamed for everything that goes wrong. Your friend may have done something wrong, but it may be you who gets blamed for it. You are made a scapegoat. As kids, when we did not want to do something, we usually ended up saying, “My parents won’t like it”. We made this excuse because we did not want our friends to get mad at us, but at our parents. So, we put the blame on them — we made them the scapegoat. ‘Fall guy’ is another word which has more or less the same meaning as ‘scapegoat’.

The Manager was made a scapegoat for the team’s terrible performance.

Poor Sujatha was made a scapegoat for the Vice Chancellor’s blunders.

When used as a verb, the word means ‘to make a scapegoat of’.

I don’t understand why they scapegoated the producer for the failure of the film.

Union leaders were attempting to scapegoat foreign companies.

Nowadays, when we hear the word ‘scapegoat’, we immediately think of a person. When the word was first used, it referred to an actual goat. During the ancient Hebrew Day of Atonement ceremony, two goats were randomly chosen for sacrifice. The priests, then, performed rituals to cleanse the people of the town of their sins. The collected sins were then symbolically transferred onto one of the goats. This animal, which was called ‘scapegoat’, meaning ‘the goat that escaped’, was then released into the wilderness, and it carried away with it the sins of the community. As for the second goat, it was sacrificed. When you think about it, the meaning of ‘scapegoat’ has changed over the years. The scapegoat of today does not really escape; he is more like the sacrificial goat! Whenever something goes wrong, he is the one who is sacrificed.