screw the pooch (third-person singular simple present screws the pooch, present participle screwing the pooch, simple past screwed the pooch, past participle screwed the pooch)
1. to screw up; to fail in dramatic and ignominious fashion
The term was first documented in the early “Mercury” days of the US space program. It came there from a Yale graduate named John Rawlings who helped design the astronauts’ space suits. The phrase is actually a bastardisation of an earlier, more vulgar and direct term which was slang for doing something very much the wrong way, as in “you are fucking the dog!” At Yale a friend of Rawlings’, the radio DJ Jack May (a.k.a. “Candied Yam Jackson”) amended this term to “screwing the pooch” which was simultaneously less vulgar and more pleasing to the ear.
