Analyzing The Most Concerning Idiom In The English Language
Please don’t screw your pooch
Idioms in the English language tend to sound weird when you think about them literally. The idea of cats and dogs falling from the sky is absolutely terrifying, and not many people actually rub me at all, let alone the wrong way.
However disturbing these idioms might be when used literally, no other figure of speech is more concerning than “screw the pooch.” Let’s break this down.
The pooch is the subject of our idiom, and “pooch” is simply an informal word for a dog. Nothing wrong here, it’s more so the word “screw” that I’m concerned about. “Screw” is a bit more ambiguous as it has a few colloquial meanings.
When speaking literally, “screw” means to turn a threaded object into place. Dogs are not threaded objects however, so we’ll need to go through figurative definitions.
One possibility is that it means to cheat or swindle. Honestly, I prefer this definition because it’s significantly more wholesome than where this is going. In another world, “screw the pooch" could be slang for an easy business deal. I love dogs as much as the next guy, but they are terrible businessmen and women. For reference, my dog was chewing on a bone that was starting to turn into a choking hazard. I grabbed a single piece of her kibble that she has access to at all times of the day, and offered to trade her that one piece of kibble for a bone that she gets as a treat. She, being a dog and therefore an idiot, accepted the kibble and dropped her bone. This example of “screwing the pooch" is slightly more literal, and so much more acceptable for my brain to understand. But for some ungodly reason, that isn’t what it means.
The other figurative definition of “screw" refers to penetrative intercourse, and unfortunately, in the case of our poor pooch, that is what is being referenced in our idiom. Why this expression came to be so popular is beyond me, but here’s a weird linguistic history lesson for you.
“Screw the pooch" is actually a bastardization of a completely different idiom that isn’t commonly used anymore. In the early 1900’s “feed the dog" was a figure of speech which meant to be lazy. That makes sense, it doesn’t take very long to feed a dog, so if someone was taking a long time feeding their dog it was probably because they were just being lazy. That’s pretty cute if you ask me.
It did not stay cute.
By the 1930’s there was a common joke that ruined this sweet figure of speech. I can only find the punchline when I’ve searched for it online, but here’s the joke as best as I can figure.
A man went about his day trying to remember his to-do list for that night. “Feed the dog, fuck the wife."
He repeated this to himself through the day so he wouldn’t forget. “Feed the dog, fuck the wife.”
He stopped at the bar on his way home and drank until he was drunk. But he kept remembering, “feed the dog, fuck the wife.”
He finally got home and the night was a bit of a blur due to the drinking, but through it all he remembered, “feed the dog, fuck the wife.”
However when he woke up the next morning with his dog in the bed he realized that he had instead fed the wife, and fucked the dog.
Now we’re not here to analyze comedy, but this is objectively the stupidest joke I’ve ever heard. I can only surmise that this is a precursor to the “my wife is ugly" jokes that the boomer generation find so amusing. Regardless, “fucked the dog" became widely used as a way of saying someone failed miserably.
While he wasn’t the first to use the expression, the author Tom Wolfe decided to use “screw the pooch" in place of “fuck the dog" when writing the book The Right Stuff. This also applied to the movie adaptation of the same name, which helped popularize the expression.
In retrospect, “screw the pooch” is certainly a better phrase than “fuck the dog,” but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s completely unnecessary to use this expression at all. To err is human, and we have plenty of other ways to say so without bringing man’s best friend into it.
