Dictionary

make fetch happen en · VERB

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."

Meanings

1. (humorous, slang) To make something, especially a term or expression, catch on.
   • 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. 2025 November 5, Alison Herman, “Lorne in Limbo”, in Variety, volume 370, number 2, →ISSN, page 39:
   • I was born 'James', and despite Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively trying to make fetch happen, James remains very much a boy's name. 2017, Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both, unnumbered page:
   • 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. 2020 December 31, Kara Swisher, “Goodbye, Twitter Trump! And Other Predictions for 2021”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 26 Mar 2021:
   • The term “trank plot” is my own. I'm trying to make fetch happen. 2020, Richard McElreath, Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and S, unnumbered page:
   • 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.) 2023 March 14, Paris Hilton, chapter 2, in Paris: The Memoir, HQ, published 15 May 2024, →ISBN, part 1:
   • 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, Mark Lazerus, Denis Savard, If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Blackhawks, unnumbered page:

Forms

wikipedia: Mean Girls