Screw the Pooch

[Reverend Joe]

1. screw the pooch

To **** things up royally; originally used by U.S. naval aviators to mean "crash one's plane into the water"


Deal with it.

"Screw the Pooch
The phrase screw the pooch, meaning to mess up, commit a grievous
error, was made famous in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff. The phrase
is a euphemism from US military slang. The original expression was
**** the dog and meant to waste time, to loaf on the job.

**** the dog dates appears in print for the first time in 1935, but in
1918 another euphemistic version, feeding the dog, appears. The
original sense dates to 1918. Over the decades, the meaning shifted to
the current sense and the screw the pooch wording took the place of
the original phrasing."

Etymologies & Word Origins
http://www.wordorigins.org/wordors.htm

"The phrase 'screw the pooch' itself was derived from an earlier
phrase that was quite familiar to those of us in the service in WW2. I
was a Fire Control Computer technician (Fire Controlman) in the US
Navy 1944-1946.

Anyone who has ever been in the military has spent an inordinate
amount of time in a 'stand-by' formation waiting for someone to get
the orders to start some activity. Many man-hours were spent in an
activity that was commonly known as 'Effing the dog.' [Note: They
didn't really say, 'Effing,' but I'm sure you can figure it out.] Back
home in civilian life this was cleaned up to the slightly more
acceptable 'screwing the pooch."

The LangaList
http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2002/2002-03-21.htm

But yeah, I really need to quit drinking every night and having impassioned debates over what I perceive to be the Andes, what may in fact be a series of molehills.

Still, I kinda prefer the older meaning... there's something much more... eloquent about the idea of "sitting around and ******* the dog."