Blame the computer dog ate homework

In his telling, the dog was not his but one in the street who ate some of the papers after a wind blew them out of his hand. This elicits the same response, rendered in Standard English rather than dialect. The excuse for the brevity of the document did not become the punchline for another 18 years.

Lexicographer Barry Popik, who called it "the classic lame excuse that a student makes to a teacher to cover for missing homework", found citations in print increasing from 1976. During the next decade, personal computers became more common in American households and schools, and many students began writing papers with word processors.

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.

The earliest known variation on the idea that written work might be adversely affected by the tendency of some dogs to chew on paper came in a 1905 issue of The Cambrian, a magazine for Welsh Americans. William ApMadoc, the journal's music critic, related an anecdote about a minister temporarily filling in at a country church in Wales.