"screw the pooch"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 08:21:35PM -0500, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> 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.

(I should note that this quotation was not one of my discoveries, but
was taken from Lighter's HDAS, the original source of _The F-Word_.)

Jesse Sheidlower

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