Hitchcock's McGuffin story possibly derived from a story about an imaginary mongoose

[Douglas G. Wilson]

  On 10/17/2010 8:19 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Hitchcock's McGuffin story possibly derived from a story
>                about an imaginary mongoose
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Not just interesting and entertaining: brilliant!
>
> It isn't clear whether _Time_ got their version of the story directly or
> indirectly from Hitchcock himself.
>
> Surely Hitchock, like most literate Britons, knew the difference between a
> mongoose and a McGuffin. (Mongooses figure prominently in both Kipling and
> Saki.) This, even more than the footnote, suggests that he'd heard the stor=
> y
> with "McGuffin" already in it, especially since in his version the animal o=
> r
> apparatus is used to catch tigers, which is beyond the capability of
> mongooses.
--

No doubt Hitchcock's story was equivalent to the mongoose story (I've
heard a few variants myself).

But of course it's possible that the story actually had nothing at all
to do with the origin of the term "McGuffin", but was only connected to
this "McGuffin" as a retrospective guess or error (by Hitchcock or
somebody else).

At G-books, apparently the same passage twice, in disgusting snippet
form, dated 1925 and 1926 (of course the date etc. should be checked):

<<I forget who was the creator of "McGuffin," but a "McGuffin" is a gift
that is not to be opened until Christmas.>>

This appears to be in a light/humorous piece about newly-coined words or
new words which are needed, so it's not clear (to me) whether "McGuffin"
referring to a Christmas present really existed previously.

Anyway, assuming this passage is what it seems to be and correctly
dated, we have a candidate for the ancestral "McGuffin", surely
appropriate in form and perhaps appropriate in sense also. I suppose
that the necklace or document or whatever item is called for by a story
plot is something which for suspense purposes is not to be revealed
until a certain point ... so it's "do not reveal until the
climax/denouement/whatever", a good analogy to "do not open until Xmas".

Pardon me if this quotation has appeared here before; I don't see it in
the archive.

-- Doug Wilson

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