I heard it’s an aviator term. When they mess up a landing and crash in the water.
Later it became a phrase for “I fuc*ed up”.
Does pooch mean anything besides a dog?
I’m trying to figure out the origins of this phrase.
It comes from the military expression “fucked the dog”, as bowdlerized by Tom Wolfe in “The Right Stuff”. Really.
A jovial way of saying you’re going to spend the day playing hooky/goofing off is “Eh, I think I’ll just stay home and fuck the dog”. That transformed into the sense of being asleep at the controls, and thus being responsible for failure through negligence, as “screwed the pooch” is used now.
In Canada, supposedly, the expression “fucked the dog” lives on in its original hooky-sense.
It was first seen in print in the 1970’s and in the 1980’s it really took off:
Here are all the appearances of it in books up through 1990:
Google“screwed the pooch”&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1990&lr=lang_en
It certainly does. “Dog fucking” very specifically refers to slacking off and not getting the work done. It does not refer to incompetence but to laziness or perhaps lack of attention. Used liberally at every construction site in the country. I came in to state the glaringly obvious connection, but I guess it is not so obvious if it is not used that way in the US anymore.
In the movie Stand By Me which takes place during Labor Day weekend of 1959, Corey Feldman’s irrepressible Teddy uses it in the line:
“Ha ha, Gordie loses! You lose Gordie! Ol’ Gordie just screwed the pooch!” after Gordie loses the coin toss to see who goes off to fetch some grub.
Great Answers. 
I knew nothing about the “F the Dog” expression. I can see how it got cleaned up to “screwed the pooch”.
Thanks everyone.
Never heard of it. Maybe it’s regional?
I read that first as “nooky-sense” and did a double take.
Interesting. Both you and FluffyBob are apparently Albertans. Is one of you a transplant from elsewhere in the country? I’d be curious to get a better handle on the distribution of this expression.
It’s a common expression to me. Umm… doesn’t it originate from the fact that when dogs finish copulating, the male’s penis gets locked inside the female and both animals stand there awkwardly doing nothing, waiting for the male to disengorge?
In the US Navy we called it “dicking the dog”. This meant “not doing very much”.
“How’s this job going?” “Oh, we’re just dicking the dog.”
I always thought this was the origin of the phrase. “Screwed the pooch” is obviously a cleaned up version. And “fucked the dog” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. “Dicking the dog” seems right to me, people love alliteration in their vulgarities.
I can live with my shame no longer. I… I meant to say “jocular” instead of “jovial” here. Subtle difference, I suppose, but I still wish I’d typed the right word.
This is all true. I live in BC, and worked on many construction sites. Dog fucking was used very liberally. Could even be an insult as in, ‘John is such a dogfucker’
Never heard “screwed the pooch” and “dicking the dog” doesn’t sound right. It does mean to kinda stand around and not be working, you look like you could be working but you aren’t doing anything productive. I still have never understood WHY they would use that expression though, can’t make the connection. Is it the standing around after sex thing?
I’m from Ontario, and I’ve never heard it in this sense. Never worked construction (or similar blue-collar) jobs either, just for the record.
So you’ve never been watching youtube on your computer, been caught, and called a dogfucker?
I definitely associate it with Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. It really took off after he used it there.
Tangent: I was looking up “monkey fucking a football” to see what the internet could provide as an origin of that expression when I ran across this and just had to post about it here: http://www.monkeyfuckingafootball.com/order.html
I know “fucking the dog” means to slack off, but I’ve never personally heard it used in this sense. One of my friends has though, and he did a double-take the first time. On the other hand, I have heard it in French (“fourrer le chien”) which means the same thing.
I heard it plenty when I worked blue collar jobs in Ontario. I haven’t heard it very much here in Alberta though.
Heck, I’ve been in the Canadian Reserves for over half my life and I don’t recall hearing the phrase “fucking the dog” or variants.
However, I do know that if someone asks you a question for which there is no ready answer, you are supposed to raise a fist to the level of your nose and make a thrusting movement, implicitly and rhetorically replying “[who the] fuck knows?”"