MacGyverism

It wasn’t very difficult to track down the meaning or history of the word MacGyverism mostly because it was a straight road to where you might think it would lead. According to the Collins Dictionary, MacGyverism refers to any person who uses the resources at hand to successfully resolve a situation in which they find themselves.

Angus MacGyver, played by American actor Richard Dean Anderson, always found ingenious ways to get out of what seemed to be impossible situations from 29 September 1985 through to 21 May 1992 on the U.S. television show MacGyver. He was a fictional secret agent and a strong ally to social and environmental causes who relied on the practical application of scientific principles and on-the-spot inventiveness using everyday items at his immediate disposal.

To most fictional characters in the series as well as viewers watching the show, MacGyver used random and useless pieces, tying them together to create an unexpected and effective way to counteract inevitable danger certain to spell his demise.

The items he used most often were his Swiss Army knife, a roll of duct tape (which he conveniently kept in his back pocket and flattened so it would fit without creating bulk), a sturdy plastic ID card, a Timex watch, strike-anywhere matches, paper clips, chewing gum, and a flashlight. The character was a multilinguist fluent in English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and American Sign Language, and he know International maritime signal flags as well as Morse code.

All this was possible for MacGyver in light of the fact his character was written as having a genius intellect and a penchant for improvisation and adaptability.

The term MacGyverism is derived from the television character and his amazing ability to overcome dangerous situations most others would be unable to survive.

On 19 October 2006, Hudson Street Press published “What Would MacGyver Do? True Stories of Improvised Genius in Everyday Life” by Brandon Vaughan. The book, according to the blurb, was inspired by the fictional character Angus MacGyver and included this passage:

Inspired by television’s Angus MacGyver (played by Richard Dean Anderson), a secret agent who relied on his brains and scientific prowess – not to mention duct tape and a Swiss Army knife to save the day, the “MacGyverisms” recounted range from the concrete (using Chex Mix to provide traction in an icy parking lot) to the intangible (saving a relationship with the perfect turn of phrase).

The term has also led to the verbs “to MacGyver” and “MacGyverize.” In fact, “to MacGyver” was courtesy of Stephen Lunch on 1 August 1997 in his article published in the Orange County Register.

To fix something without benefit of tools or a manual is called “to MacGyver” a solution after the television show in which Richard Dean Anderson disarmed nuclear bombs with paper clips.

In an interview with MacGyver producer and writer Stephen Downing for the Christian Science Monitor published on 24 December 1987, David R. Francis wrote this:

“[MacGyver] relies on his ingenuity and knowledge, rather than violence, to complete dangerous missions. [Downing] calls the use of science techniques as “MacGyverisms.”

It sounds to Idiomation that those who enjoyed the television series took to MacGyverizing because they liked what the main character stood for and how he didn’t have to rely on violence to get himself out of scrapes.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 1: Stephen Downing retired from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1980 after more than 20 years of service. He rose to the title of Captain of Detectives, and he established homicide investigation techniques that continue to be used to this day. He was a Commanding Officer of the Juvenile Division and then the Commanding Officer of the Southwest Area where he designed and implemented the first functionally integrated police operation in law enforcement dealing with gang activity.

INTERESTING SIDE SIDE NOTE 1: Stephen Downing’s son, Michael P. Downing has also served as an LAPD Deputy Chief, and served as the Commanding Officer of Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations, becoming the interim Chief of Police after Chief William J. Bratton stepped down in 2009.

However, it was a year earlier in 1986, in the second-season episode 3 titled, “Twice Stung” that the character of Joanne Remmings (played by Pamela Bowen) used the term. Later on in an episode of “Stargate SG-1” the character of Samantha Carter (played by Amanda Tapping) used the term.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 2: Richard Dean Anderson played the role of Colonel Jack O’Neill in “Stargate SG-1” which aired on 27 July 1997. The series was a spin-off from the movie “Stargate.”

There was a MacGyver reboot (23 September 2016 to 30 April 2021) that ran for four seasons which starred American actor, model, and producer Lucas Till in the role of Angus MacGyver. As you can well imagine, the MacGyverisms continued.

And so Idiomation has pegged the term to 1986 and episode 3 of MacGyver as the source of the term. The next time someone says you’re guilty of a MacGyverism, smile. You’re being compared to a genius-level who adapts well to unexpected situations.

Pipped At The Post

To be pipped at or on or to the post means to be defeated by someone by a very narrow margin or at a crucial moment. While it’s generally used when talking about a race or competition, but overall it has to do with not succeeding where success was almost guaranteed, or by the underdog gaining a small advantage at the last decisive moment resulting in the crowd favorite losing.

The pip in question has nothing whatsoever to do with the dots on a dice or domino. It has nothing to do with the diamond-shaped segments on a pineapple. It hasn’t any connection to the insignia on the shoulder of an officer’s uniform indicating rank. Those are all pips, but they aren’t the pip in the idiom.

The Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang both refer to the pip as being depressed or out of sorts, and dates back to the 1830s. But from 1896 onward, the pip meant to annoy or irritate someone. From Idiomation’s point of view, losing at the last minute what was believed to be a guaranteed win would certain annoy and irritate the loser, so while the reason for the expression makes sense, when did it come about as an idiom?

The idiom is still in use today, as evidenced by the research paper published in Frontiers in Psychology on May 2019 titled, “Pipped at the Post: Knowledge Gaps and Expected Low Parental IT Competience Ratings Affect Young Women’s Awakening Interest in Professional Careers in Information Science” by Angela Schorr of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Siegen (Germany).

When Collins Dictionary released its words of the year that rise to use in the twelve months leading up to the list being published, most people thought Megxit was a shoe-in for first place in 2020 after Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, left the UK for Canada and subsequently America. But the pandemic had other plans and lockdown won the coveted first place by a nose as lexicographers announced lockdown as the word of the year.

The headline for the article on 10 November 2020 and written by Yahoo! News’ royal correspondent, Rebecca Taylor, announced:

‘Megxit’ Makes Shortlist of 2020 Word of the Year But Pipped to the Post by ‘Lockdown’

In the 18 March 2018 edition of the Messenger Newspaper in the UK they shared the news that The Sunday Times Best Places to Live Guide had named Altrincham as the best place to live in North West Britain. According to the guide, Altrincham was “a cool slice of suburbia with big family houses” and was a 25 minute ride on the tram if one wanted a little city living to go with that. The headline read:

Altrincham Pipped at the Post as Best Place to Live

The Canberra Times used the expression in a story published on 9 May 1988. The Syndey Swans were playing against Geelong Cats (who were favored to win the game) in Melbourne. The Swans were trailing badly by halftime, and in the third quarter, there was a 22 point margin between the two teams.

Then something unexpected happened, and things began to go horribly wrong for the Cats and incredibly right for the Swans. Then, according to the newspaper, Geeling rover Robert Scott set up a shot that really had little to no hope in succeeding. He went with a shot at goal from 50 meters out, at a 30 degree angle … into the wind. A true Hail Mary play if ever there was one!

The ball hit the post, resulting in the winning goal being played by the Cats. The headline read: Geelong Pipped at the Post by Swans.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE #1: In the 1970s, when Digital Equipment Co was taken over by Compaq, there was a utility known as the Peripheral Interchange Program, or PIP. To transfer a file from disk to tape or another disk, users had to do so using this program and entering the correct commands, and because of this, to transfer was to pip. It isn’t, however, the same pip as in this Idiomation entry.

It appears the expression is mostly used by those who live in England, Ireland, and Australia as nearly all of the published instances were found in newspapers and books from England, Ireland, and Australia.

For example, the 5 September 1948 edition of the Sheffield Telegraph and Star told the story of a man who had been blind for at least 35 years and yet continued gardening and his relation to the Thomas Glossop Memorial Cup.

The gardening competition was started by the Abbeydale Amateur Gardening Society which had been started by Vicar of St. John’s Abbeydale. The cup was awarded on the most points scored.

Every year, the blind man did all his own gardening, raising his plants from seeds, and keeping his garden weed-free thrugh his sense of touch. He had won the gardening award from the time WWI broke out, up until his death in 1940. In 1958, the man’s son, Arthur H. Glossop, suggested the cup be the runner-up to the winner of The Kemsley Cup presented by The Star newspaper. He was quoted in the newspaper saying:

“My father always had a lot of sympathy for the man who was just pipped at the post, and I am delighted to think that his cup would be a consolation to such a competitor,” said Mr. Arthur Glossop.

In the 12 January 1926 edition of The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate newspaper reported on a horse race that was so close that the reporter wrote that “a majority of the onlookers thought that [Gadamin] had just got [to the finish line]” with regards to a the horse race in which Gadamin was racing.

It was an amazing race from a number of standpoints.

For one, this was said about one of the other horses: “Varney, from Vic Benyon’s stable, was also one of the field, but was not in the hunt until the race was practically over. He made up a lot of ground from the turn, and would probably be better suited by a longer trip.”

However the focus of the story was on the horse who didn’t win with the headline sharing the news.

Pipped On The Post: Gadamin’s Game Effort

Indeed, in the June 1903 edition of Baily’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes in the story, “Our Van” a detailed accounting of horse racing was written across several pages, and within that writing was this passage:

In a Maiden Two-Year-Old race we saw a race thrown away. In Newsboy one was found to beat Bass Rock, but Land, having accomplished this, took matters too easily, and was “pipped” on the post by Extradition. When will jockeys learn?

And there we see the word pipped in quotation marks which indicates the expression was just coming into its own.

In the 19th century Britain, to pip someone meant you wounded or killed that person, usually with a gun. It was an effective way to defeat one’s opponent. Being defeated at the finish line by one’s competitor who wasn’t the crowd favorite would also wound, and Idiomation suspects this is how the expression rose to popularity around the turn of the 20th century.

This leaves the earliest published version of pipped at or to or on the post to 1903 with only a few years before that to account for the use of the quotation marks in the 1903 article.

Jugglery

Jugglery is the art of sleight of hand although many will be quick to say it’s the art of juggling. Jugglery is any trickery or deception, and keeping any number of items up in the air all at the same time really isn’t about trickery or deception although one who tricks or deceives others relies heavily on keeping many lies up in the air all at the same time.

The word is hardly used these days, with its popularity peaking in the 1860s before slowly disappearing into relative obscurity.

The word is found the book “Betrayal of Indian Democracy” by former Assistant Commissioner of Police and East Indian author, Madhav Balwant (M.B.) Chande (1921 – 06 August 2017), and published in 1999. The book covers India from 15 August 1947 to the end of the century. The passage where jugglery is mentioned deals with poverty in the mid-1980s.

If former Union Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Pranab Mukherjee had their way, the poor may have well disappeared by now, conjured away by statistical jugglery.

Right Reverend Monsignor George F. Dillon wrote about cabalistic masonry and masonic spiritualism in his book “Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked as the Secret Power Behind Communism” which was published in 1965. The book was a compilation of lectures delivered in Edinburgh in October 1884, and the book was originally titled, “The War of Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization” and was published in 1885 by M.H. Gill and Son Ltd of O’Connell Street in Dublin, Ireland.

In speaking of the wealthy, famous, and wildly mysterious Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1743 – 6 October 1795) — the former Italian alchemist and imposter Giuseppe Balsamo from Palermo, Sicily — who traveled throughout Europe under instructions of Weishaupt, and who was accused, charged, and found guilty of heresy, Monsignor Dillon had this to say.

He was an inveterate sorcerer, and in his peregrinations in the East, picked up from every source the secrets of alchemy, astrology, jugglery, legerdemain, and occult science of every kind about which he could get any information. Like the Masonry to which he became affiliated at an early period, he was an adept at acting and speaking a lie.

In 1887, the “Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in According with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert” was published by the J.B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia. The report was 159 pages in length and included a letter from Joseph Leidy, a member of the Seybert Commission appointed by the University to study the claims made by Spiritualist Mediums, and dated May 1887, covering dates between March 1884 and April 1887.

I have kept a record of my observations of the Spiritualist séances, but it is unnecessary to relate them here. As the result of my experience thus far, I must confess that I have witnessed no extraordinary manifestation, such as we ordinarily hear described as evidence of communication between this and the Spirit world. On the contrary, all the exhibitions I have seen have been complete failures in what was attempted or expected, or they have proved to be deceptions and tricks of jugglery.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE 1: Members of the Commission appointed to investigate the subject included William Pepper, Joseph Leidy, George A. Keonig, Robert Ellis Thompson, George S. Fullerton, Horace Howard Furness, Coleman Sellers, James. W. White, Calvin B. Kneer, and S. Weir Mitchell.

Minister of Paisley, Reverend Robert Burns’ published his “Historical Dissertations on the Law and Practice of Great Britain, and Particularly of Scotland, with Regard to the Poor” on May 22, 1819, and used the word prominently in the section titled, “No. III: Abridged View of the Law of Scotland, with regard to Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars.” The focus of the dissertation was the modes of charity available, and ways to improve life for the lower class based on facts, documents, miscellaneous inquiries, and observation.

Under the denomination vagabond, are comprehended all sorners, or masterful beggars; all idle persons that go about using subtile, crafty, and unlawful play, as jugglery, fast and loose, and the likes; the people calling themselves Egyptians (gypsies) or any other that pretend to foresee future events, and to tell fortunes, or to have skill in magic, or the like; pretended idiots; able bodied persons, alleging that they have been burst out in some distant part of the country, or that they have been banished from some other place for crimes; others having no land nor masters, nor following any lawful trade or occupation, and who can give no good account of themselves how they earn their living; all tale tellers and ballad singers, not properly licensed (i.e. not being in the service of the Lords of Parliament, or great boroughs) all common labourers, able-bodied, refusing to work; all sailors alleging that they have been shipwrecked, unless they have sufficient testimonials of the truth of their story.

Collins Dictionary gives 1760 as the first recorded used of the word jugglery however Idiomation found the word used more than 50 years before that date given.

In the book “The Indians of the Western Great Lakes: 1615 – 1760” by William Vernon Kinietz, published in 1940, quoted from a letter written in 1709. The writer was Frenchman and economic theorist Antoine-Denis Raudot (1679 – 28 July 1737) who was the Co-intendant of Nouvelle-France — along with his father, Jacques Raudot (1638 – 20 February 1728) — as well as the adviser on colonial affairs at the French court at the time. His letters reported on the Huron, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Chippewa of the area.

There are a few savages who have another sort of jugglery which they use when they wish to know if their people who are hunting or at war will return soon or have made a successful attack … <snip> … These savages are very lucky sometimes with their jugglery, but I am convinced that they are like the casters of horoscopes who would be very unlucky if among several false things which they say, there is not one thing of truth.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE 2:  Antoine-Denis Raudot had a low opinion of Canada in general, and vehemently disagreed with Governor Vaudreuil’s policy and relations with the Iroquois Confederacy which had created rifts between various Iroquois tribes.

One might think this must surely be the earliest published version of the word jugglery however the word is found in Maine Legislation of 1602 which speaks of “persons using any subtle craft, jugglery or unlawful games or plays, or for the sake of gain pretending to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmistry, to tell destinies or fortunes, or to discover lost or stolen goods, common pipers, fiddlers, runaways, drunkards, nightwalkers, railuers, brawlers, and pilferers; persons wanton or lascivious in speech or behavior, or neglecting their callings or employments, misspending what they earn.”

Jugglery: Frowned upon since at least 1602!