"Going pear-shaped" where do you first see it?

[brabazon]

The BBC are running a series on the origins of phrases and were talking about the phrase "going pear-shaped". The earliest written reference the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) have is in a book called "Air War South Atlantic" published in 1983:

http://www.oed.com/bbcwordhunt/pear-shaped.html

Anyone got an earlier reference?

[enicalyth]

Re: "Going pear-shaped" where do you first see it?

See it? Heard it. Used it. I had left the forces by 1983 and it was definitely in use then, implying someone about to erupt with anger not that things had gone tits up.

[cavortingcheetah]

Re: "Going pear-shaped" where do you first see it?

] From M-C Seminario: “What’s the history behind pear-shaped?”
[A] It’s mainly a British expression. “It’s all gone pear-shaped”, one might say with head-shaking ruefulness, in reference to an activity or project that has gone badly awry or out of control.
There are plenty of things that are literally pear-shaped, of course, such as a person’s outline, a particular cut of a diamond, or the shape of a bottle, anything in fact that is bulbous at the bottom but narrows at the top, like the pear. It isn’t immediately obvious how the literal meaning turned into the figurative one, though we do know that it started to appear in the 1960s.
A common explanation, the one accepted by Oxford Dictionaries, is that it comes from Royal Air Force slang. However, nobody there or anywhere else seems to know why. Some say that it may have been applied to the efforts of pilots to do aerobatics, such as loops. It is notoriously difficult (I am told) to get manoeuvres like this even roughly circular, and instructors would describe the resulting distorted route of the aircraft as pear-shaped.
I’ve not seen firm evidence to convince me of this explanation, which sounds a little far-fetched, but that’s the best I can do!

It may of course derive from a descriptive of the female shape when antics of a sexual nature have had ramifications other than the short jolly time originally envisaged!

[18greens]

Re: "Going pear-shaped" where do you first see it?

Its a term used in pottery.

When you 'throw' a pot on a wheel you massage and form it into a nice round shape resembling a cup. This is all fine until you make a mistake and the side walls 'give' The pot then goes from nice and round to not nice and round or generally pear shaped.

When this happens the pot needs to be scrapped. Older wiser potters can be heard to mutter into their pipes 'Its gone pear shaped'.