May goes on to explain that Rawlings enlisted in the Air Force and helped design early prototypes of space suits for chimpanzees on NASA missions. When May saw the film of The Right Stuff in 1983 and heard “screw the pooch,” he was convinced that Rawlings had introduced the expression to the space program. However, May couldn’t confirm this, since Rawlings had died in 1980.
“The accident board convened, took weeks to gather its findings, took months to file a report, and finally confirmed what everyone had assumed: pilot error rather than equipment failure. The betting in the office on the Apollo 17 crew had long since switched—aviators characteristically do not wait for the accident report—‘That sure cinches it for Dick,’ the refrain went. ‘Ol’ Gene just screwed the pooch.’ ”
The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, suggests that “screw the pooch” may “perhaps” be derived from the “coarse slang” American expression “fuck the dog,” which it defines as “(a) to shirk one’s duties or responsibilities; to mess about or waste time; (b) to make a (disastrous) mistake; to fail; to spoil or put an end to something.”
English[edit]
The term was first documented in the early “Mercury” days of the US space program. It came there from a Yale graduate named John Rawlings who helped design the astronauts space suits. The phrase is actually derived from an earlier, more vulgar and direct term which was slang for doing something very much the wrong way, as in “you are fucking the dog!” At Yale a friend of Rawlings, the radio DJ Jack May (a.k.a. “Candied Yam Jackson”) amended this term to “screwing the pooch” which was simultaneously less vulgar and more pleasing to the ear.
The term, however, did not enter the popular lexicon until Tom Wolfe used it in his book about the space program, The Right Stuff, where it was used to describe a supposed mistake by astronaut Gus Grissom.
The phrases origins come from an old joke. There are various versions, but a drunk man ends up shooting the wife and screwing the pooch (instead of the other way around).
And by 1962 we get an example of fuck the dog clearly being used in the sense of to screw up, to make a big mistake. It appears in John Oliver Killens’s novel And Then We Heard the Thunder. While the book was written in the early 1960s, the context of the phrase’s use is during World War II:
And finally, the next year Tom Wolfe uses the phrase in The Right Stuff, about the sinking of Astronaut Gus Grissom’s capsule following the second US crewed spaceflight on 21 July 1961. At the time, it was thought that Grissom had prematurely fired the explosive bolts to open the capsule’s hatch after splashdown, allowing water to pour in, sinking the capsule and almost drowning Grissom. More recent evidence has shown that the bolts were blown by mechanical failure and that Grissom had not erred. In a chapter titled The Unscrewable Pooch, Wolfe writes:
One of the last s of Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury-Redstone 4) before it sank beneath the waves on 21 July 1961. The capsule sank when the explosive bolts on its hatch blew prematurely. At the time, many blamed Astronaut Gus Grissom for screwing the pooch on this, the second US crewed spaceflight, but more recent evidence has shown it was a mechanical malfunction, not Grissom, that resulted in the capsule’s loss. The capsule was recovered from the ocean floor in 1999.
Screw the pooch was made famous by Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff, about the Project Mercury astronauts, but that book was not the first use of the phrase. Screw the pooch is a euphemistic form of the phrase fuck the dog. The latter originally meant to loaf, to goof off, to shirk one’s work, and it comes out of World War I soldier slang. The underlying metaphor is in doing something one is not supposed to be doing. Some decades later, a second sense developed, that is to make a disastrous mistake, to fail, and the screw the pooch wording has only this second sense.