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 make something, especially a term or expression, 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, archived from the original on 26 March 2021:

     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.

   • 2023 March 14, Paris Hilton, chapter 2, in Paris: The Memoir, HQ, published 15 May 2024, →ISBN, part 1:

     It caught on. Pretty soon all the kids in my class were saying, “That’s hot.” Like I made “fetch” happen! (Mean Girls reference. That’s hot.)

   • 2025 November 5, Alison Herman, “Lorne in Limbo”, in Variety, volume 370, number 2, →ISSN, page 39:

     Both allusions required some squinting to identify. Circling back to such good-but-not-that-good frameworks can feel like the “SNL” equivalent of trying to make “fetch” happen, wedging them into the canon by brute strength rather than organic enthusiasm.