"screw the pooch"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Not in HDAS was the literary locus classicus for the original sense, Norman
Mailer's The Naked and the Dead: "All right, troopers, let's quit fuggin'
the dog."

JL


On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 8:27 PM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "screw the pooch"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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