Newsgroups: alt.fan.cecil-adams
From: flaps @ dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal)
Subject: Re: expressions for wasting time
Date: 12 Jul 1996 13:26:25 GMT
Message-ID: <1996Jul12.092625.22805@jarvis.cs.toronto.edu>
References: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960707213457.5849A-100000@alcor.concordia.ca> <31e12f30.91115759@news.primenet.com> <Pine.SUN.3.91.960709011222.20560A-100000@xp.psych.nyu.edu>

Ok, here's a definitive answer on the expression "fuck the dog". I found it not in my slang or phrase dictionaries, but appropriately enough in a book entitled "The F Word", which is basically an attempt to be like the OED about all matters relating to the word "fuck". It's a fairly cool book, but a bit thick as a linear read, although I suppose a dictionary would be worse. It's by Jesse Sheidlower. It's necessarily more regional than the OED, and although it tries to be complete, there are definitely senses of some of the expressions which I'm familiar with which are missing. But not very many.

It gives a primary meaning of "fuck the dog" as "to loaf on the job, especially while pretending to be hard at work; fool around; idle; waste time." Speaking of which, I don't have time to type in all of the citations, but here are a representative few:

1919

Warren, 9th Co. 35: The Engineer's Dictionary... Walking the dog: Soldiering on the job. When one is caught at it he is said to have stepped on the puppy's tail. [presumably "walk" is euphemistic]

1935

J. Conroy, World to Win 201: One of the first things you gotta learn when you're f--n' the dog is t' look like you're workin' hard enough t' make yer butt blossom like a rose.

1942

Berry & Van den Bark, American Thesaurus of Slang 490: Fuck the dog: to loaf on the job.

1978

Alibrandi, Killshot 146: "You bet our entire stake on this one match?" "You got it, kid. No sense fucking the dog. We came to gamble, remember?"

It also gives a secondary meaning of "to bungle; blunder" but with many fewer entries. Nevertheless, the first (of the two) entries quite definitely means to screw up rather than to screw off. It's from 1962.

I think that the people claiming that it's a Canadianism or French-Canadian in origin have some convincing to do. I think they're wrong given the above quotations. And "The F Word" is a fairly American-centric book.

Bob Roman writes:
...
>the 1983 movie "The Right Stuff."
>Also from that movie is "fucking-A" as a term of agreement.

Popularized the expression, perhaps, in your neck of the woods. "Fucking-A" was definitely something we said around here when I was a teenager. "The F Word" has a slew of citations with the years 1947, 1961, 1967, 1967, 1969, ...

Unfortunately this valuable reference book does not contain the term "screw the pooch", containing, in fact, no entries between "pig-fucking" and "rat-fuck" (it would be under "pooch").

Alan "biff, biff, bam, bam, son of a bitch, god damn, highty-tighty, christ almighty, rah, rah, FUCK!" Rosenthal