How 'MacGyver' became a verb
The word "MacGyver" is now within the Oxford Dictionaries. Why features a television series that began within the 1980s made such an impression on the lexicon, asks Jon Kelly.
Fixed a broken door handle employing a coathanger? You totally MacGyvered it. Did you see your dad's windscreen wipers have dropped off? He MacGyvered them using adhesive tape and a elastic band .
There aren't many action-adventure TV dramas that make it into the dictionary, but MacGyver wasn't like other shows. It starred Richard Dean Anderson because the eponymous hero (first name: Angus) who escaped life-threatening situations by eschewing firearms in favor of improvised engineering skills and cobbled-together ingenuity. For instance, he might use a pair of binoculars to deflect a beam or fashion a smokescreen from bicarbonate of soda and vinegar (the MacGyver Wiki lists all the issues he solved in exhaustive detail). The show ran from 1987 to 1992 before settling into an afterlife on repeats channels like Bravo, though there has been talk about rebooting it with a female lead. But its influence persisted within the popular imagination, with the hero as a kind of be-mulleted Heath Robinson. A robot capable of making tools was christened the "MacGyver Bot". a contest to celebrate the ingenuity of female engineers was called "The Next MacGyver." the highest definition for "MacGyver" on Urban Dictionary, originally posted in 2003, runs thus: "Someone who can jump-start a truck with a cactus." The Oxford Dictionaries state that to "MacGyver" is to form or repair something "in an improvised or inventive way, making use of whatever items are at hand", eg "he MacGyvered a makeshift jack with a log". Danielle George, professor of frequency engineering at the University of Manchester, who delivered a 2014 Royal Institution Christmas lecture urging people to form things with common household objects, thinks it's unnecessary - the verb "to tinker" already describes attempting to enhance something during a casual way, she says. But she believes the addition may be a sign that "the public are repairing or repurposing objects in an ingenious way, which may be a stounding and is a positive statement in an apparently disposable society". Perhaps those re-runs are due another viewing.
Post a Comment