“dog,” 1917, American English, of unknown origin. Earlier it was a dog name, attested as such by 1901 as the name of a dog owned by Dick Craine, “the Klondike pioneer” (the article in the May 12 Buffalo Courier reports: ” Pooch is the Alaskan name for whisky, and although the dog is not addicted to the use of this stimulant, he is a genuine Eskimo dog, and, therefore, it is appropriate”). Harvard coach “Pooch” Donovan also was much in the news during the early years of 20c.
Searching for the provenance of a word or phrase, as I’ve noted before, rarely turns up a single “just-so” story. But even when a definitive origin remains elusive, the voyage through rich cultural and personal worlds can make it all worth it. So thank you, “screw the pooch,” for introducing me to Candied Yam Jackson and the Playing Mantis.
But where did the enjoyably assonant “screw the pooch” come from and how did the Mercury astronauts end up using it? Searching for clues, I noticed that the entry for the expression on Wiktionary had been anonymously edited a few years ago to give credit to “a Yale graduate named John Rawlings who helped design the astronauts’ space suits.” In turn, the Wiktionary editor claimed, Rawlings got it from a Yale friend, “the radio DJ Jack May (a.k.a. ‘Candied Yam Jackson’),” who had softened “fuck the dog” to be “simultaneously less vulgar and more pleasing to the ear.” Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement
After the splashdown of Grissom’s capsule, Liberty Bell 7, the explosive bolts unexpectedly blew off, requiring a messy rescue operation. Many wondered whether Grissom himself was to blame for the error. Did he “screw the pooch”? (The movie unfairly implies that he did.) Advertisement
In his book New York in the ‘50s, Dan Wakefield remembers how Rawlings, a high school friend, thrived in the Greenwich Village scene as a writer, musician, and artist. He befriended sculptor Alexander Calder, as well as e.e. cummings, the inspiration for his Yale production. At night he’d accompany himself on piano at a midtown nightclub, where he was billed as the Playing Mantis.
Whether the action was feeding, walking, or fornicating, though, all of these early examples were used to mean “to loaf around” or “to waste time” (dogs have often been associated with laziness, as in the expression “dogging it”). Later on, possibly around World War II, “fucking the dog” and its euphemistic equivalents took on a secondary meaning of “blundering.”