act the goat vs mess about

act the goat

verb
  • To play around in a silly manner. 

mess about

verb
  • To play with; to toy with; to waste the time of (a person). 

  • To misbehave 

  • To be in a casual non-committal relationship 

How often have the words act the goat and mess about occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )