World Wide Words: McGuffin

MCGUFFIN

[Q] From Sharon Villines: I have three spellings for the word that was used by the famous director Alfred Hitchcock for the object of desire in a mystery story: MacGuffin, McGuffin, maguffin. Which is the earliest spelling and where did it come from?

[A] According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded usage is in a typescript of a lecture that Alfred Hitchcock gave at Columbia University on 30 March 1939. In that text, presumably his lecture notes rather than a transcript, the word is spelled MacGuffin.

He is said to have derived it from a brief story of the shaggy-dog type told by Alfred Hitchcock’s friend and colleague, the script editor Angus MacPhail, an extraordinary valetudinarian eccentric with the memory of an elephant who delighted in wordplay, puns and puzzles and who at one time earned his living by making up jokes for Tommy Trinder. This is the story as it appears in Quotation Marks by Marjorie B Garber. It concerns two Scottish men in a train and a strange parcel in the luggage rack:

”What have you there?” asked one of the men.
”Oh, that’s a MacGuffin,” replied his companion.
”What’s a MacGuffin?”
”It’s a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
”But there aren’t any lions in the Scottish Highlands!”
”Well, then, I guess that’s not a MacGuffin!”

Like the device in the parcel, the idea of the MacGuffin is rather slippery. It’s the trigger for the story, the factual pretext on which the action depends that is used to catch the attention of the audience, but which isn’t very important or relevant to the plot. It’s merely a catalyst. It might be a purloined letter, a stolen necklace, a missing set of secret plans, the decoded message hidden in a shaving brush, the photographic negatives. It’s only significant because it’s wanted by everybody. What was really important in the story to Hitchcock was the characters and their interactions.

These days the term has spread beyond film. In books searchable online, the spelling is split almost equally between MacGuffin and McGuffin, the latter being the OED’s preference and the one more common in British publications. The lower-case version is currently rare; it’s just possible that it may prevail as the word becomes generic and the links to its origin are lost.