Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

The idiom "screwing the pooch", meaning to panic and do something, was popularized in the 1960s by NASA and Tom Wolfe, apparent;ly, having been a poliyer way to say "fucking the dog", apparently for "fucking the dog" which was used by the military in WWII.  And, of course, these days, no panic is required., and indeed, no blame is necessarily attached, only that things somehow went sideways.

Ngrams show "screw the pooch" starting to get popular about 1972, "screwing the pooch" starting about two years later and having limited popularity, and "screwed the pooch" becoming popular about 1982, peaking in the mid-1990s, but still about 3 times as popular as "screw the pooch" which suggests it's a lot more popular to bemoan the past than to predict the future.

The three tenses of fuck the dog are all more popular than screwing the dog today, but the -ed is lowest, with just plain fuck the most common.  Interestingly, fucking the dog was the only one that charted from 1936 to 1957, all three pretty much extinct until 1963 when fuck the dog was born and fucking the dog was resuscitated. .  Fucked the dog didn't get used much until about 1983.

Despite showing hits for a decade earlier, the oldest cite that Google offers is in 1947 - Americans, Germans and the Military by George Dearborn Spindler - who says the term "clearly show a negative evaluation of authority, especially since they are used as terms of approbation for skillful negation of the demands of authority.

I suspect the term originated in a dirty joke about a guy who was so drunk that..., but that sort of thing never made the priinted page in books you didn't keep iin the garage....

Thoughts about the origin of the phrase?  (My sympathies, Glenn.  Servers do that sort of thing unless you face them four ties a day and offer a prayer of thanks, and even if you do, sometimes do it just to remind the sysop who's in charge.)