man Friday
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Related to man Friday: Robinson Crusoe
man Friday
An assistant who is capable of many different types of tasks. I like to have my son be my man Friday during "take your child to work" day. He's a better worker than some of my employees!
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2015 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
a man Friday
A man Friday is a man who is trusted by someone and helps them with lots of different jobs. She is toying with the idea of sending her new man Friday to Uttar Pradesh. Note: You can also call a woman a girl Friday. I became Lucian's girl Friday and would go during the night to fetch him from the National Gallery. Note: This expression comes from the name of a character in the novel `Robinson Crusoe' by Daniel Defoe.
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2012
girl/man Friday
Trusted assistant. This term comes from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), in which Crusoe found a young savage on a Friday, and this man became his faithful servant and companion on the desert island. “I take my man Friday with me,” said Crusoe. Some mid-twentieth-century advertising pundit invented “girl Friday”—or gal Friday—to describe the female clerk-of-all-work, presumably on the assumption that it lent some glamour to a low-level, poorly paid position. It caught on mainly through being used as the title of a 1940 motion picture starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday. In the 1970s, when affirmative action came to the American labor market, the term fell into disrepute.
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer Copyright © 2013 by Christine Ammer