quoting Hitchcock, and wikipedia:
"[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers."
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:[2]
- It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh that's a McGuffin." The first one asks, "What's a McGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!" So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.
Hitchcock related this anecdote in a television interview for Richard Schickel's documentary The Men Who Made the Movies. Hitchcock's verbal delivery made it clear that the second man has thought up the MacGuffin explanation as a roundabout method of telling the first man to mind his own business. According to author Ken Mogg, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, a friend of Hitchcock's, may have originally coined the term.[3]
Leonardo said:
To summarize, I think a McGuffin should have a relevance on the plot, no matter how big a relevance, if we see the mcguffin or if we don't, if we understand what it is and how it works. I don't think it is something easy to define. For instance, I think the Dmc Delorean in the BTTF Trilogy, while being one of the protagonists, is also a McGuffin, because we have a vague idea of how it works, yet the stories center around the vehicle, and happen because of it. The plans in Star Wars could also be defined as McGuffin I think, for the same reasons.
So, to summarize, words DON'T actually have meaning, The Boost. Or at least very few people here are in agreement with you that they do.