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SO, YOU COME TO ME ABOUT ETYMOLOGY?!?!? As you should, you know I love that stuff. The problem with the phrase "cock up" is that it is a slang phrase, and also contains the word "cock" in it, which makes it SUPER difficult to place where it came from (because cock has like 6 meanings and could be a verb or a noun and also an onomatopoeia to say the least). Anyways, there is actually some mild arguing in the linguistics community about where the phrase originated from with a lot of people arguing that it COULDN'T POSSIBLY come from the use of the cock on an arrow because the DATES DON'T MATCH?!?! (If it wasn't clear, I find this argument to be very silly because not only is this clearly a slang word, and would have been used far more verbally than written (decreasing available evidence), and also because, as we know from modern day, slang can come from literally anywhere! (What even does 6,7 mean??) so, actually, people can argue that we only started using the term "cockup" to mean something gone horribly wrong in the 1940's because that's the earliest documented use of it with that exact meaning BUT this does NOT mean that it comes from "cocking a gun" JUST BECAUSE there was a massive war at the time?! Correlation does not prove causation. It could be a revived historical slang that only regained popularity in the 1940's (that's my personal theory). There are SO MANY different places that the term cockup could come from that we actually have no definitive answer at all! Language is fun like that. My personal theory is that we arrived at using cockup from an amalgamation of ALL the different meanings of the word that could go wrong and because English is such a wild language this is VERY possible. SO, if you accidentally scare the woodcocks while hunting, if you leave the stopcock open on a barrel of beer, if there's wild penis somewhere unexpected, if you put the cock of the arrow in the wrong place and your aim is wide, THAT'S A COCKUP!