Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Lifestyle

What took so long for ‘MacGyver’ to make it into the dictionary?

Give it up for the gang at Oxford Dictionaries: No longer making us wait 75 years for the next fully updated edition to come out in hardcover, they’re regularly adding new words fizzing through social media. Just this month, the Oxford crew added up-to-the-minute lingo like “manspreading,” “SJW,” “Redditor” and “MacGyver.”

Wait — MacGyver? This is the 1989 update, right?

No, on Aug. 27, 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries site finally did right by MacGyver and decreed that it was a verb: To make or repair (an object) in an improvised or inventive way, making use of whatever items are at hand.

Between 1985 and 1992, MacG aired on either Sunday or Monday nights on ABC, always highlighting the ingenious ability of mullet-headed secret agent Angus MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) to find his way out of a jam using everyday objects — defusing a bomb with a paper clip, using binoculars to deflect a laser beam, etc.

No one seemed to miss “MacGyver” when it went off the air 23 years ago. So how did it stay alive? Short answer: “The Simpsons,” where it became the perfect punch line. Patty and Selma mentioned it on a Feb. 6, 1992, episode (“Homer Alone”), with Selma exclaiming, “Richard Dean Anderson will be in my dreams tonight.”

At least three other “Simpsons” episodes mentioned MacGyver, and Anderson himself later guest-starred on the show in 2006, when Patty and Selma kidnapped him when he was promoting a later show he starred in, “Stargate SG-1” (which also made in-joke “MacGyver” references).

In 2001, They Might Be Giants released the song “All MacGyver On It”; in 2006, Anderson spoofed MacGyver in a Super Bowl commercial; and Will Forte’s “MacGruber” spoofs on “Saturday Night Live” started running in 2007, leading to the (disastrous) 2010 movie.

Former late-night talk show host Arsenio Hall noted way back in a 1989 chat with Anderson that he had heard “MacGyver” used as a verb. So the Oxford Dictionaries are running about 26 years behind. If you’re miffed that “slow clap,” “#TBT” and “pornstache” haven’t made it into Oxford yet, check back around 2041.