Last week, when I was talking about the difference between duct tape and Duck tape, I described it as “that especially strong tape that helps you MacGyver your way through life,” and a listener named Judith asked “Where did [MacGyver] come from as a verb,” and I had to laugh because, of course, many of you would have no idea what I was talking about! I’m sorry. I spend half my life thinking about why we say unusual phrases such as “to boot” and “beyond the pale,” and I had a huge blind spot about MacGyver because it is so familiar to me.
"MacGyver" was a TV show in the United States that was popular when I grew up in the 1980s. I actually can’t remember much about it except that it became a joke in my family that MacGyver could fix almost anything with duct tape. The best overview I could find comes from Wikipedia:
“The show follows secret agent Angus MacGyver [who was] educated as a scientist in physics …. Resourceful and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, he solves complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects, along with his ever-present Swiss army knife, duct tape, and occasionally matches.”
It’s uncommon to use “MacGyver” as a verb. In a search, it looks like people occasionally use “MacGyvering” on Reddit, and there’s an entry in Urban Dictionary going back to 2005. I found a couple of examples of the past tense—“MacGyvered”—in the Corpus of Contemporary American English:
Here’s one from “Skiing” magazine:
After more than an hour struggling up the trail with a MacGyvered towing system for nine people plus gear, everyone arrived at the cabin.
And this one is from a “Technology Review” magazine article about ALS patients:
Many of them, he saw, were adapting to the challenges of their disease with creative tactics such as switching to electric toothbrushes...
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