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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Surely "McGuffin" never really "meant" a "gift not to be opened till
Christmas" to any statistically significant number of people. (Conceivably
it was a joke term in use by Schauffler's family.)  What would lead to such
a connection?  And the referent does not have the cultural importance
associated with things that prompt the evolution of widespread synonyms. I
think the word only makes sense as a joke - which is how it functions in the
story.

McGuffin is such an uncommon name as to make it unlikely that two persons
would independently hit on it - apparently arbitrarily - to designate
something mysterious. And in both cases that mysterious something is the
content of a box, parcel, bag, etc.

Of course, maybe Schauffler himself - or one of his (comparatively few)
readers inserted the name into the mongoose story, which we know had a
certain traceable circulation since the late 1800s. And by chance, maybe
that story got to Hitchcock.

Stranger accidents and coincidences have occurred, but I think it far more
likely than not that Schauffler's McGuffin is connected with Hitchcock's.
Not that mere "likelihood" settles anything.

As innumerable surprising antedatings of expressions here and elsewhere
suggest, it would not be too surprising to discover through something like
divine revelation that a McGuffin version of the mongoose story was in
limited circulation fifteen or twenty years before Hitchcock began to use
the word.  I'm not appealing to ignorance here, I'm simply saying that it's
perfectly possible and that we don't know for sure.


JL



On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Hitchcock's McGuffin story possibly derived from a story
>              about an imaginary mongoose
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > It leads me to wonder if Schauffler had heard the mongoose/apparatus
> story
> > with, perhaps, the added detail that the mongoose/apparatus was a
> Christmas
> > gift for someone. An interlocutor might then have said something like,
> "What
> > sort of a McGuffin is it?"
> >
> > Worthless conjecture, but it would be nice to account for this 1925
> McGuffin
> > as something more than complete coincidence.
> --
>
> My own speculation would be that Schauffler's word was the etymon, and
> that Hitchcock's etymology story was irrelevant and probably false.
>
> Is there any independent evidence of the existence of a "mongoose"-type
> story using the word "McGuffin"? If not, it's surely plausible that
> Hitchcock or his informant was either misremembering something or just
> casually fabricating an etymological myth. If there was a previous
> "mongoose"-type story containing the word "McGuffin" (and there may have
> been), I would still speculate that it had no etymological relevance
> (but that Hitchcock or his informant might have thought that it had).
>
> Just my speculation, but not necessarily any worse than Hitchcock's.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
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