"screw the pooch"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 5:57 PM, David A. Daniel wrote:
>
>  Ben Zimmer wrote:
> >
> > Researching "screw the pooch" took me in some interesting directions.
> > I wrote up my findings for my Wall St. Journal column:
> >
> > http://on.wsj.com/poochbz
> > (If paywalled, just Google the title, "The Pedigree Of a Naughty 'Pooch'")
> >
> > And here is the longer unexpurgated story for Slate's Lexicon Valley:
> >
> > http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/01/14/screw_the_pooch_etymology_of_the_idiom_dates_back_to_nasa_and_the_military.html
>
> But wait, "fuck the dog", AFAIK, means and has always meant to do nothing,
> procrastinate, futz, waste time. If "screw the pooch" is a euphemism for
> FTD, how did it get from "doing nothing" to "committing an egregious
> blunder" in the NASA and Ms. Ward sense? Therein lies the missing link, I
> think.

In "The F-Word," Jesse has examples of "fuck the dog" meaning 'to
blunder' going back to John Oliver Killens' novel _And Then We Heard
the Thunder_ (1962), which takes place during WWII. So it may have
already developed that sense by then (as I suggest in the Slate
piece). In previous discussions here, I believe it was suggested that
"fuck up" (and "screw up") could have pushed "fuck the dog" (and
"screw the dog/pooch") in this direction.

It's perhaps notable also that in Jack May's telling of the John
Rawlings story, either sense of "fuck the dog" would work -- in
procrastinating on his architecture project, Rawlings was both
screwing around and screwing up. I'd imagine that similarly ambiguous
situations could have encouraged the semantic shift.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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