Comments on: THE FRIDAY LIST

By: Norris McDowell

Norris McDowell — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 09:27:10 +0000

Jerry:

“Trouble” reminds me of a few lines from Merle Travis’s classic “Dark as a Dungeon.”

“…Where troubles are many and pleasures are few; where the rain never falls and the sun never shines, it’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mines.”

Norris

By: Jerry Dennis

Jerry Dennis — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:42:49 +0000

Thank you, Gretel. Interesting. I learned the expression on the job when I was a construction worker, where it meant to slack off or to look busy while accomplishing nothing. The more vulgar and maybe more popular variation was “fucking the dog.” Worth noting that several guys I worked with were World War II veterans. It’s also worth noting that every crew I ever worked on included a guy or two who was highly accomplished at accomplishing nothing.

By: Gretel Van Wieren

Gretel Van Wieren — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:54:26 +0000

Jerry,

Love the idea of list-making based on google search on Fridays, and laughed really hard at your use of “screwing the pooch” — so I googled it. Here’s what I found:

Screwing the pooch…

to fuck things up royally; originally used by U.S. naval aviators to mean “crash one’s plane into the water” — Urban Dictionary

It came there from a Yale graduate named John Rawlings who helped design the astronauts’ space suits. The phrase is actually a bastardization 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!” — Wiktictionary

I think I’ll leave it at that.