One of the last images 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.
18 October 2021
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.
Fucking the dog, or rather a euphemized version of it, feeding the dog, appears in the 25 May 1918 issue of the Trouble Buster, a monthly unit newsletter published by the U.S. Army General Hospital No. 2 at Fort McHenry, Maryland. It appears in a glossary of army abbreviations:
F.T.D.—Feeding the dog. The supposed occupation of a soldier who is killing time.
The phrase appears uneuphemized, but still expurgated, in Jack Conroy’s 1935 novel A World to Win:
“One of the first things you gotta learn when you’re f——n’ the dog,” said Leo, “is t’ look like you’re workin’ hard enough t’ make yer butt blossom like a rose. Rattle templets, beat the hammer on a beam, but do somethin’. If the boss ketches you f——n’ the dog while you’re helpin’ me, he’ll eat me up blood raw. First thing I ever learned from old Willie, the sawyer, when I went t’ work in the mill in Green Valley, was t’ fool around doin’ nothing’ but keepin’ busy at the same time.”
A use of the phrase which can be interpreted as either to loaf or to err appears in 1954 in a psychological case study by Daniel Silverman:
Two days later he precipitated an argument with his boss and was fired. He was able to see that that he was trying to act a defiant role and to punish himself. This was followed by a four-month period of “funking”, “fucking the dog”, characterized by drinking, missed hours, tardiness, and “sponging” on mother.
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:
Friday night Rutherford called him into the office. He looked at him sternly. Finally he said, “Saunders, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, I swear before the Lord I don’t. You’ve gone and fucked the dog again.”
Solly thought, he’s found out about the letters! And he realized then how scared he was about them. His heart was beating doubletime. To hell with Scotty. He didn’t want any part of the stockade. A sharp pain in between his buttocks. “We did our best, sir.” Hating the sound of his own voice. “Private First-Class Moore and I—”
Rutherford cut him off. “You’ve done your level best all right. You just had the best damn records in the regiment, that’s all. The CO smiling broadly now. “You just keep fucking up like that and you just might make sergeant one of these days.”
The screw the pooch wording is in place by 1978, when it is used in Michael T. Hinkemeyer’s novel The Creator in a passage in which a Russian contemplates American slang:
It meant Vazarov was watching that was good and bad. Good if Markov brought home the bacon, and bad if he ... what was a good phrase? Bad if he couldn’t cut the mustard, or screwed the pooch? These Americans! They even made movies about the latter, he had learned, which were regarded as high art among certain social circles in New York City. Still, they had an inventive language, even if it did not approach the evocative force and color of a good Russian curse.
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:
In flight test, if you did something that stupid, if you destroyed a major prototype through some lame-brain mistake such as hitting the wrong button—you were through! You’d be lucky to end up in Flight Engineering. Oh, it was obvious to everyone at Edwards that Grissom had just fucked it, screwed the pooch, that was all.
And a bit later:
The Mercury astronauts had official immunity to three-fourths of the things by which test pilots were ordinarily judged. They were now ablaze with the superstitious aura of the single-combat warrior. They were the heroes of Kennedy’s political comeback, the updated new frontier whose symbol was a voyage to the moon. To announce that the second one, Gus Grissom, had prayed to the Lord: “Please, dear God, don’t let me fuck up”—but that his prayer had not been answered, and the Lord let him screw the pooch—well, this was an interpretation of that event that was to be avoided at all cost.
In the 1983 movie version of Wolfe’s book, these passages are played as a conversation between test pilot Chuck Yeager and flight engineer Jack Ridley (in real life, Ridley had died in 1957, but the movie kept him alive for dramatic purposes):
RIDLEY: Pull that in flight test, it's all over for him. He screwed the pooch, partner. Plain and simple.
YEAGER: Sometimes you get a pooch that can't be screwed. The President's got his own problems with the Bay of Pigs. He doesn't want the astronauts' image tarnished. Nothing these guys do is going to be called a failure.
What we have here is a term that circulated in American military slang for decades, until a euphemized version broke out into the general public’s perception.
Sources:
“Army Abbreviations.” The Trouble Buster, 1.4, 25 May 1918, 4. ProQuest.
Conroy, Jack. A World to Win. New York: Covici Friede, 1935, 203.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. screw, v., dog, n.2.
Hinkemeyer, M. Thomas. The Creator. Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1978, 63–64.
Kaufman, Philip, director and screenwriter, Tom Wolfe, novel. The Right Stuff (film). Warner Bros: 1983.
Killens, John Oliver. And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962). Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1983, 144.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, modified September 2021, s.v. screw, v.; June 2008, modified September 2021, s.v. fuck, v.
Sheidlower, Jesse. The F Word, third edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 22–23, s.v. dog, n.
Silverman, Daniel. “The Analysis of an Unconscious Pinocchio Fantasy in an Obsessional Neurosis.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 35, 1954, 351. PEP-WEB Journals Archive.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979, 289, 290–91.
Image credit: NASA, 1961. Public domain image.