the dog ate my homework is a sad one

• LA Times Crossword
• February 21 2022

The dog ate my homework is a sad one

While searching our database we found 1 possible solution for the: The dog ate my homework is a sad one crossword clue.  This crossword clue was last seen on February 21 2022 LA Times Crossword puzzle . The solution we have for The dog ate my homework is a sad one has a total of 6 letters.

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'The dog ate my homework' is a sad one Crossword Clue

Here is the answer for the crossword clue 'The dog ate my homework' is a sad one . We have found 40 possible answers for this clue in our database. Among them, one solution stands out with a 98% match which has a length of 6 letters. We think the likely answer to this clue is EXCUSE .

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"The dog ate my homework" is a sad one (6)

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(Other definitions for excuse that I've seen before include "Release (from a duty)" , "Defense of offensive behavior" , "Forgive - apology" , "Absolve" , "A self-justification" .)

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Clue: "The dog ate my homework" is a sad one

Referring crossword puzzle answers, likely related crossword puzzle clues.

• Justification
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• "The dog ate my homework," e.g.

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• LA Times - Feb. 21, 2022

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Why Do We Say “The Dog Ate My Homework”?

The history of the delinquent schoolchild’s favorite excuse..

Did this sad Lab eat your homework?

iStockphoto.

Viacom announced on Monday that Mitt Romney had declined to appear on Nickelodeon’s Kids Pick the President special this year, citing time constraints. President Obama’s camp pounced on Romney’s decision, saying, “Kids demand details … ‘The dog ate my homework’ just doesn’t cut it when you’re running for president. ” When did “my dog ate my homework” become known as schoolchildren’s favorite excuse?

The 1970s. Delinquent schoolchildren and adults have been blaming their shortcomings on their pets for more than a century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that “my dog ate my homework” came to be considered the No. 1 likely story. One of the first sad sacks who was said to blame his dog for his own ill-preparedness was a priest. In this anecdote, which appeared as early as 1905, a clergyman pulls his clerk aside after a service to ask him whether his sermon seemed long enough. The clerk assures him that it was very nice, “just the right length,” and the priest is relieved. “I am very glad to hear you say that,” he says, “because just before I started to come here my dog got hold of my sermon and ate some of the leaves .” The story was repeated again and again . The first citation of the excuse in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1929 article from the Manchester Guardian , which reads, “It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework.” In Bel Kaufman’s best-selling 1965 novel Up the Down Staircase , a list of students’ excuses for not having their homework includes “ My dog went on my homework ” and “ My dog chewed it up .” Even in 1965, however, it was still just another excuse.

“My dog ate my homework” became known as the quintessential far-fetched excuse in the next decade, when the phrase was used over and over . In a 1976 account of the Watergate tapes, E.C. Kennedy describes listening to President Nixon “ working on the greatest American excuse since the dog ate my homework .” A 1977 article from Alaska’s Daily News-Miner describes the difficulty students faced in coming up with a new excuse since “ ‘My dog ate my term paper’ is no longer acceptable .”

The excuse was alluded to more and more throughout the 1980s. A 1982 Time magazine column on excuses suggested that “The dog ate my homework is a favorite with schoolchildren,” while a 1987 New York Times column about how students were starting to blame malfunctioning computers and printers quoted one teacher as saying she recently received “ a note from a student’s mother saying the dog ate his homework .” Even the president picked up on the trend: When Congress pushed spending approval to the last minute in 1988, Ronald Reagan complained to reporters, “ I had hoped that we had marked the end of the ‘dog-ate-my-homework’ era of Congressional budgetry … but it was not to be .” It was all over television, with references to the excuse on shows like The Simpsons and Full House . By 1989, the narrator of Saved by the Bell theme was singing, “ And the dog ate all my homework last night .”

The phrase continued to grow more popular. Between 1990 and 2000, the New York Times wrote articles with headlines such as “ Beyond ‘Dog Ate My Homework’ ” and “ Homework Help Sites (Or, the Dog Ate My U.R.L.) ,” while The New Yorker described one criminal’s accounts of his wrongdoings as having “a decided my-dog-ate-my-homework quality.” Children’s books tried to capitalize on the trend with titles like A Dinosaur Ate My Homework , Aliens Ate My Homework , Godzilla Ate My Homework , and My Teacher Ate My Homework , daring to use the term to promote reading and education. Such titles have continued into the 2000s, but in recent years the phrase seems to finally be losing steam .

Bonus Explainer: An Obama spokesperson also said, “ It’s no surprise Romney decided to play hookey .” Why do we call cutting school “playing hookey”? To play hookey began as an Americanism in the 19 th century. The earliest known citation comes from 1848, from John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms , where it was said to mean “to play truant” and noted to be “ a term used among schoolboys, chiefly in the State of New York .” Word historians usually suggest that it’s from to hook it meaning to run away , a term as old as the Revolutionary War. However, others have proposed that it might derive from the Dutch expression hoekje spelen , the Dutch expression for “hide and seek”—especially since playing hooky emerged in New York during a time when it had a larger Dutch population.

Got a question about today’s news?  Ask the Explainer .

Explainer thanks Barry Popik, Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com .

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Clue: "The dog ate my homework" is a sad one

We have 1 answer for the clue "The dog ate my homework" is a sad one . See the results below.

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• Rationalization
• "The dog ate my homework," e.g.
• Any of this puzzle's theme entries
• Cover story
• "The dog ate my homework," for one
• "I forgot" isn't a good one
• It may be poor
• "My alarm didn't go off," e.g.

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• LA Times - February 21, 2022

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Where Did The Phrase “The Dog Ate My Homework” Come From?

Dogs are known as man’s best friend. Dogs keep us safe, are hard workers … and can provide a handy excuse in a pinch. Maybe that’s why versions of the classic expression the dog ate my homework have been around for hundreds of years.

Today, the dog ate my homework is used as a stock example of the kind of silly excuses schoolchildren give for why their work isn’t finished. Very rarely do people say, “the dog ate my homework” and expect it to be taken literally; they use the expression as an example of a typically flimsy excuse.

So where did the phrase come from?

Forrest Wickman, a writer for Slate , describes the legend of the 6th-century Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise as the alleged first recorded “the dog ate my homework” story. According to the tale, Saint Ciarán had a tame young fox that would take his writings to his master for him. One day, the fox grew up and decided to eat the leather strap binding the writings together instead. Still, this tale is more Garden-of-Eden parable and less terrible schoolchild excuse.

The notion that dogs will eat just about anything, including paper, turns up in lots of stories over the centuries. An example comes from The Humors of Whist , published in 1808 in Sporting Magazine . In the story, the players are sitting around playing cards when one of them remarks that their companion would have lost the game had the dog not eaten the losing card. Good boy.

Some attribute the creation of the dog ate my homework to a joke that was going around at the beginning of the 20th century. In a tale found as far back as an 1894 memoir by Anglican priest Samuel Reynolds Hole, a preacher gives a shortened version of a sermon because a dog got into his study and ate some of the pages he had written. However, the clerk loved it because they had been wanting the preacher to shorten his sermons for years.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first example of the dog ate my homework excuse in print can be found in a speech given by retiring headmaster James Bewsher in 1929 and published in the Manchester Guardian : “It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework.” The way this comment is phrased suggests that the whole dog ate my homework story had been around for some time before it was put in print.

When was the word homework created?

But in order for a dog to eat homework specifically, homework had to be invented (oh, and how we wish it hadn’t been). True, the word homework , as in what we call today housework , appears as early as 1653. But homework , as in school exercises to be done at home, isn’t found until 1852. Once we had homework , it was only a matter of time before the dog was accused of eating it.

How we use this phrase now

No matter the origin, sometime in the 1950s, the expression became set as the dog ate my homework . This inspired any number of riffs on the theme, like my cow ate my homework or my brother ate my homework . In the 1960s, the dog ate my homework continued to gain popularity. The expression popped up a couple times in politics over the years, like when President Reagan said to reporters in 1988, “I had hoped that we had marked the end of the ‘dog-ate-my-homework’ era of Congressional budgetry … but it was not to be.”

It seems unlikely that the dog ate my homework was ever used consistently or frequently by actual schoolchildren. In fact, it’s the unlikeliness of the story that makes it so funny and absurd as a joke. Instead, teachers and authority figures appear to have cited the dog ate my homework many times over the years as such a bad excuse they can’t believe students are really using it.

In the 21st century, students don’t spend as much time working with physical pen and paper as they once did. That may contribute to the decline in the use of the phrase. So, maybe soon we’ll see a new equally absurd phrase pop up. Come on Zoomers, you’ve got this.

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StarTribune

Where did that doggone phrase come from.

When did "my dog ate my homework" become known as schoolchildren's favorite excuse?

Delinquent schoolchildren and adults have been blaming their shortcomings on their pets for more than a century, but it wasn't until the 1970s that "my dog ate my homework" came to be considered the No. 1 likely story.

One of the first sad sacks who was said to blame his dog for his own ill-preparedness was a priest. In this anecdote, which appeared as early as 1905, a clergyman pulls his clerk aside after a service to ask him whether his sermon seemed long enough. The clerk assures him that it was very nice, "just the right length," and the priest is relieved. "I am very glad to hear you say that," he says, "because just before I started to come here my dog got hold of my sermon and ate some of the leaves." The story was repeated again and again.

The first citation of the excuse in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1929 article from the Manchester Guardian, which reads, "It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework." In Bel Kaufman's best-selling 1965 novel "Up the Down Staircase," a list of students' excuses for not having their homework includes "My dog went on my homework" and "My dog chewed it up." Even in 1965, however, it was still just another excuse.

"My dog ate my homework" became known as the quintessential far-fetched excuse in the next decade, when the phrase was used over and over. In a 1976 account of the Watergate tapes, E.C. Kennedy describes listening to President Richard Nixon "working on the greatest American excuse since the dog ate my homework." A 1977 article from Alaska's Daily News-Miner describes the difficulty students faced in coming up with a new excuse since "'My dog ate my term paper' is no longer acceptable."

The excuse was alluded to more throughout the 1980s. A 1982 Time magazine column on excuses suggested that "the dog ate my homework is a favorite with schoolchildren," while a 1987 New York Times column about how students were starting to blame malfunctioning computers and printers quoted one teacher as saying she recently received "a note from a student's mother saying the dog ate his homework."

Even the president picked up on the trend: When Congress pushed spending approval to the last minute in 1988, Ronald Reagan complained to reporters, "I had hoped that we had marked the end of the 'dog-ate-my-homework' era of congressional budgetry ... but it was not to be." After that, the phrase was all over television, including shows such as "The Simpsons" and "Full House."

Between 1990 and 2000, the phrase continued to grow in popularity. The New York Times wrote articles with headlines such as "Beyond 'Dog Ate My Homework' " and "Homework Help Sites (Or, the Dog Ate My U.R.L.)." The New Yorker described one criminal's accounts of his wrongdoings as having "a decided my-dog-ate-my-homework quality."

Not to be outdone, children's books tried to capitalize on the trend, with titles like "A Dinosaur Ate My Homework," "Aliens Ate My Homework," "Godzilla Ate My Homework" and even "My Teacher Ate My Homework."

While such book titles have continued into the 2000s, the phrase seems to finally be losing steam.

That means schoolkids will have to come up with a new, improved excuse.

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From Our Listeners

Sometimes the dog really does eat your homework.

Last week, we brought you the story of how the phrase "The Dog Ate My Homework" came to be and how it morphed into a palpably ridiculous excuse. Turns out, sometimes its not an excuse at all. Weekend Edition host Scott Simon has a few stories from our listeners that swear, honest, the dog did eat their homework.

Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

April 18, 2014

Contemporary Fiction , Education

The Dog Ate My Homework

It seemed like the most plausible excuse at the time: blame the new dog for eating up my now overdue essay. But then I just had to embellish...

Karen Donley-Hayes

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The fact of the matter was, I didn’t have anyone else to blame. So I blamed Roscoe–perhaps ill-advised, him being my father’s K-9 partner-in-waiting, but I had completely forgotten my homework. I wasn’t in the habit of lying or putting blame where it didn’t belong, but I was caught off guard–daydreaming about Roscoe, in fact. My third grade teacher now loomed over my desk, expectant, her hand outstretched, fingers wiggling. And in my deer-in-the-headlights stare, with Miss Underwood frowning down at me, the words blurted out all on their own.

“Roscoe ate it.”

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“What?” Miss Underwood scowled more, if that were possible. She planted her fists against her ample hips and leaned in, hovering over me.

I blinked, swallowed a spitless lump in my throat, and having already lied, promptly repeated myself. “Roscoe ate it,” I said with slightly more conviction.

Miss Underwood stood stiff, smack dab in front of my desk, so close I should have been able to smell the little flowers on her dress. I had an overpowering impulse to move away from her, but my chair shackled me to the spot. I stared at the vibrant gladiola sprouting out from beneath Miss Underwood’s belt, and felt the entire class’s attention span shake from all else and swoop down on me.

“Mister Pike. You are not lying to me, are you?” It was more a challenge than a question.

Miss Underwood absolutely terrified me–almost as much as did the prospect of acquiring the entire class’s ridicule or getting caught in a bald-faced lie–and such terror can be a remarkable survival mechanism, because my brain spun a web and my mouth spewed it out without so much as consulting with me. I sat, breathless and rapt with the rest of the class, listening to this story unfold.

“Oh, no ma’am,” a voice–my voice–poured out of me, my brain, frenetic, only barely keeping a syllable ahead of my mouth. “I wrote my report on the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs,” I heard. (It was a good thing I had recently become fascinated by this amphibious process and had not only been reading about it but observing it in the natural setting of our backyard.) “And I took the paper with me to the pond so that I could look at them and draw pictures to show the stages, and Roscoe came with me, and I had a tadpole on the top of the paper so I could trace it and Roscoe saw it and before I knew what happened he jumped on it and swallowed it whole, and the paper.”

I shifted my bug-eyed gaze up the floral landscape to the teacher’s face. Miss Underwood remained completely still.

“And the rock that I had holding the paper down,” my voice said. Her eye twitched, barely perceptible. “And the pencil I was using.” Her brows drew closer together. “And then it was dark, and I couldn’t draw them again, and then I had to do my chores and it was time for bed.”

Miss Underwood frowned, unwedged one hand from her hip and pointed at my chest. “You’d better be sure to get that dog to the vet, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I nodded vigorously. “We’re taking him this afternoon.”

“Good,” she said. “And re-write your report and bring it in tomorrow. Along with a report on how Roscoe did at the vet’s.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and wondered if the pittance I had in the Mason jar under my bed could buy me a plane, train, or boat ticket anywhere else in the world.

That afternoon, when I slouched from the school bus, Roscoe careened down the driveway to meet me, his half-grown legs all knobs and paws flying indiscriminately; he seemed none the worse for wear for his “misadventure” of the day before. I trudged up the driveway, the pup orbiting around me, bounding and panting, pausing only to wolf down my mother’s lone remaining gladiola. While my reporting of late had been very light on honesty, there was truth to the fact that Roscoe was a one-canine mauling, gulping, devouring, completely-nondiscriminatory eating machine. The gladiolas, much to my mother’s dismay, had vanished into his maw during a single galumphing frenzy; this was shortly after Roscoe had discovered the infinite wonders that the frog pond in the backyard held. Mom had admonished my father to restrain the dog. Dad had testified that socialization was critical to Roscoe’s mental development and future as a police dog. Mom declared her flowers unfair casualties. Dad promised to build a fence for her gardens (a moot point, as Roscoe had already decimated them).

The sound of my mother’s footsteps on the porch drew my attention; I looked up to see Roscoe gleefully caprioling by her side. She had her arms crossed over her chest, and was staring at me with an expression that immediately made me slow my already lethargic trudge.

“I hear Roscoe ate your homework,” she said. There was no tone of accusation or belief–or even disbelief, for that matter–just a simple statement. I stopped and looked up at her, and for two ticks of a heartbeat I was on the verge of coming clean. I steeled myself to admit my lie, to face the consequences, and to be a better man for it. During those two ticks of a heartbeat, Roscoe splayed himself on the porch and latched onto one of the banister posts, gnawing and grunting.

“Yes ma’am,” I said, and felt the heat rise under my collar as I lied to my own mother. I looked intently at Roscoe (who supported my story with his every action) to avoid looking in my mother’s eyes. I heard her sigh.

“Well, alright then. I called Dr. Brown’s office as soon as Miss Underwood phoned me, so let’s get things together and get going. Hopefully, he’ll be fine; it’s that rock I’m worried about.”

I nodded and walked up the porch steps, head down and ashamed, and slipped past my mother, past the squirming, euphoric mass of German shepherd enthusiasm. My mother stayed on the porch while I dropped my book bag on the kitchen table. Roscoe leapt up, flung himself against her legs. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her reach down idly and rub his head. He gazed up at her adoringly, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, wood splinters flecking his lips; his tailed swished nonstop across the porch.

“Maybe the paper and rock and all just went right through him,” I said, and hoped that if a dog actually were to eat a paper and a rock, they might actually move right along. Otherwise, I was going to be busted when the vet checked the dog out and declared him devoid of foreign objects. Not that I wanted him to have a problem; I didn’t, but his clean bill of health was my sentence. Granted, it was of my own making.

“I hope so,” Mom’s voice came in from the porch. I heard her add, under her breath, “Roscoe, you’re going to be the death of me if you live long enough.”

In the vet’s waiting room, I studiously worked on my tadpole-to-frog report, shielding it from Roscoe, who my mother worked up a sweat restraining. And when it was finally his turn to go in and be examined, and I was left with silence and the weight of my own guilt, I could barely remember the details of amphibian metamorphosis, much less write about them. Mom, quiet, read a paperback. The clock on the wall ticked off five minutes, 10, 15; the smell of the waiting room mixed with the odor of wet dog, cat pee, and rodent cage litter, and I began to feel nauseous.

“How’s your paper coming?” Mom asked. I shrugged. I sweated.

I was nearly to the point of breaking down and admitting my guilt, or at least bolting from the waiting room and into the parking lot, when Dr. Brown summoned us. Mom clutched her purse, and I drooped behind her, a condemned man going to the gallows. The vet brought us into the execution chamber, and closed the door. The harsh florescent lights gleamed, ruthless and all-seeing. Roscoe was not in the room to witness my punishment.

Dr. Brown cleared his throat. I felt a prickling thrill of sweat, and stared fixedly at the poster of canine parasites on the wall. “Well, we took x-rays of Roscoe, and we don’t see your rock or your paper.”

I couldn’t help a fleeting glance at the vet; he met my eyes for a beat, then looked over at Mom. “But it’s a good thing you brought him in, because we did see something else.”

I blinked, confused.

“Oh?” my mother said.

Dr. Brown turned his back to us, popped a thick sheet of film against a panel, and turned on the light behind it. Ribs and spine and gray masses flickered to light. Dr. Brown glanced over his shoulder toward us. Both Mom and I leaned toward the glowing image. Dr. Brown cleared his throat again and pointed to something in the middle of the picture. I looked closer, squinted, and then with a sting of recognition, I understood the image on the screen. My mother realized at the same time, and she chuffed, glancing sidelong at me.

“This,” Dr. Brown said, tapping the image of my G.I. Joe, recently MIA, “needs to come out. And it won’t come out the easy way like that rock did,” he glanced down at me again. “It will snag other things he swallows, and you’re going to have a bad emergency situation, maybe a dead dog.”

My mother reached for the collar of her blouse, pressed her hand flat. “Oh, no. Oh, poor Roscoe!”

My skin prickled again, but I wasn’t worried about my guilt and punishment anymore. “Will he be okay?” My voice sounded tiny and tremulous. “He won’t really die, will he?”

Dr. Brown smiled then. “No, I think we got him in time. We’ll put him on the surgery schedule for the morning, and he should be right as rain in a month’s time.” He reached a hand out and ruffled my hair. I realized I was crying. “In a way, it’s a good thing he ate your homework, otherwise you might not have found out about this until it was too late.”

I looked up at him lamely.

That weekend, Dad fenced off what was left of Mom’s gardens, I patrolled the entire house and yard and commandeered all swallowable objects (and even some that didn’t seem swallowable), and my folks and I discussed the new obedience regimen for Roscoe. When he came home a few days later, belly shaved but none-the-worse for wear, I doted on him and chaperoned him vigilantly. After a short period of gorging withdrawal, Roscoe adjusted gleefully to his obedience training, and was already ahead of the learning curve when he officially entered his police-dog training.

I was too ashamed to ever admit to my parents my panic-induced homework fabrication. I like to think that the guilt and anxiety I experienced for that long afternoon was punishment enough, and sometimes, I also like to think that it was all part of the plan for Roscoe’s long and decorated life. I like to think that, but I don’t believe it much more than Miss Underwood believed me.

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the dog ate my homework

• 2011 May 6, Damian Carrington, “Environment action delays blamed on 'dog ate my homework' excuses”, in The Guardian ‎ [1] , archived from the original on 2022-08-24 : Their reasons for missed deadlines are mostly of the " dog ate my homework variety" including such easily foreseeable events as yesterday's elections and that the badger culling policy is "difficult and sensitive".
• 2014 September 12, Oscar Webb, quoting Donald Campbell, “UK Government Changes Its Line On Diego Garcia Flight Logs Sought in Rendition Row - Again”, in VICE ‎ [2] , archived from the original on 2022-12-05 : The government's excuses for Diego Garcia's missing records are getting increasingly confused and desperate. Ministers could hardly be less credible if they simply said ' the dog ate my homework .'
• 2017 February 18, Mia Berman, “Go West-minster, Young Mastiff”, in HuffPost ‎ [3] , archived from the original on 2019-04-09 : Our immune system's weak; we've been sick as a dog, missing work and school, resorting to " the dog ate my homework " excuses amidst these frigid dog days of winter.

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