"Screwed the Pooch"

 

Headline of the Month

   Although I could not find a good Canadian image to illustrate our topic for today, the one above should suffice and, as well, indicate that variants of the phrase are widely used. It is an odd bit of slang, but it is found in this CBC headline on Nov. 22, 2022: 
" 'Your Guy Really Screwed the Pooch,' texts Kenney, Upset With Feds Over Coutts Blockade." The term is not really explained in the article, but it is clear that many people "screwed up" when the Emergency Act was invoked.

   Apparently pooch screwing is synonymous with blundering or making an egregious mistake, but the discriminating readers of Mulcahy's Miscellany will only be satisfied if a bit of philology is applied. Here is that bit.

   Readers of this blog likely first encountered the phrase when reading The RIght Stuff by Tom Wolfe. The rest of you probably heard it uttered in the film with that name back in the last century. More recently in this one, you may have been surprised when a CBS News correspondent  used the phrase on "Face the Nation" when discussing the Obama administration and the war in Syria. If one is travelling to outer space or navigating through the political milieu, there are lots of opportunities to "screw the pooch" and apply acronyms like SNAFU or FUBAR. 

"F****** the Dog"

  It is likely that "screwing the pooch" is a euphemism for the more vulgar "F****** the dog," which like SNAFU and FUBAR, originated in the military. The latter phrase has a different meaning and I thought of it when I first encountered a new one - "Quiet Quitting." It is likely most of us were aware of "QQ", before it was a thing, and had a colleague or two who were slacking off, being lazy, dogging it, or as we would say after work and a few drinks, "Jim was "f****** the dog" again today." 

Sources:

   The use of the less vulgar variant of the phrase is described in this article: "Review - The Week - The Word on the Street - The Pedigree of the Naughty Pooch," Ben Zimmer, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2014. Mr. Zimmer discusses the topic in more detail in a publication which allowed him to mention the more vulgar phrase: "A Reporter Said 'Screw the Pooch' on Face the Nation: Where Does That Phrase Come From?", Slate, Jan. 14, 2014. 

   Everything you need to know about the F-Word is found in the plainly titled book, The F-Word by the lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower. It is published by the Oxford University Press and a copy used to be found in the London Public Library. I suppose that someone f***** off with it. For more F information see: "Swearing & Slurring." 

The Bonus:

  In the longer article by Mr. Zimmer, this is noted: 

 "It’s not impossible, after all, for various military personnel to have independently transformed “fuck the dog” into “screw the pooch” on separate occasions. After my Wall Street Journal column was published, former Navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur P. Menard wrote in to say that he recalled “screw the pooch” being used to describe fatal crashes in 1959, when he was a midshipman aboard the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, and again in 1960 in flight school in Pensacola. He described it as “black humor in the Naval air arm for a very unfunny incident.”

  If the USS Oriskany rings a bell that may be because I mentioned it in my post about Senator John McCain where a review of the book, Over the Beach: The Air War in Vietnam is presented. It's easy to screw the pooch on an aircraft carrier.