make fetch happen

English

Etymology

From the 2004 film Mean Girls, in which the character Gretchen Wieners repeatedly uses fetch as a synonym for cool, leading another character to tell her to "stop trying to make fetch happen."

Verb

make fetch happen (third-person singular simple present makes fetch happen, present participle making fetch happen, simple past and past participle made fetch happen)

1. (slang, humorous) To try to make something catch on.
   • 2017, Mark Lazerus, Denis Savard, If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Blackhawks, unnumbered page:

     Teuvo Teravainen was Turbo in Rockford, and despite the best efforts of Jonathan Toews—er, Tazer—to make Fetch happen, it never stuck in Chicago.

   • 2017, Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both, unnumbered page:

     I was born 'James', and despite Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively trying to make fetch happen, James remains very much a boy's name.

   • 2020, Richard McElreath, Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and S, unnumbered page:

     The term “trank plot” is my own. I'm trying to make fetch happen.

   • 2020 December 31, Kara Swisher, “Goodbye, Twitter Trump! And Other Predictions for 2021”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     He’ll rage and then head over Parler to try to make fetch happen, which will not satisfy his enormous ego. It will all end in a whimper.