man Friday

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!
See also: Friday, man
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

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.
See also: Friday, man
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.

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.
See also: Friday, girl, man
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer
See also:
  • a man Friday
  • girl/man Friday
  • person Friday
  • girl Friday
  • face the day
  • fight fires
  • rush around like a blue-arsed fly
  • do (one's)/the dirty work
  • do someone's dirty work
  • run around like a blue-arsed fly
References in periodicals archive
Like 'Man Friday,' whose relationship with 'Robinson Crusoe' the main character in Defoe's novel is touted as the father-son type of intimacy and the former genuinely caring for the welfare of his circumstantial lad, ' Man Friday,' so also is Gen.
Buratai As Troops' 'Man Friday'
BEIRUT: Police detained a 32-year-old man Friday who shot at a vehicle carrying his 5-year-old daughter, ex-wife and her father in a Beirut suburb last week.
Father apprehended after shooting at vehicle
WORCESTER -- Police arrested a local man Friday for carrying a gun without a license after a passer-by noticed the firearm in the man's waistband.
Man faces firearms charge after passer-by reports gun
Besides his father, Akhilesh is surrounded by his uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav and his father's Man Friday Mohammad Azam Khan, who keep defying him, giving the impression that the young CM does not have control over his council of ministers.
Betrayal of public faith
Plaudits also go to narrator Kay Sanders, baddie Craig Garner-Beasley and Man Friday Samuel Hudson, while the supporting cast includes Alex Lewis (Scurvy), Ian Bottrill (Weevil), Lisa Gibson (Coral) and Faye Nicholson (Mustaffa).
Soaraway success; Stage-struck giant moth adds to the laughs at town panto
BERLIN, Safar 17, 1435, Dec 20, 2013, SPA -- After spending 10 years in Russian jails for what many in the West believe were trumped-up offenses, Mikhail Khodorkovsky left prison a free man Friday and immediately flew to Germany.
Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky a free man
But then we end up meeting our mates later in the day, no time to go home and change and we end up in a club, dressed like Robinson Crusoe looking for Man Friday, trying to chat up a lass in a summer dress looking at us as if we've just floated in on a raft.
Weekend warm-up
A court in northwest China's Qinghai Province sentenced a Tibetan man Friday to 13 years in prison for "goading" a monk to self-immolate and inciting splitting of the state, state-run Xinhua News Agency said.
China imprisons Tibetan to halt self-immolation
KARACHI, November 19, 2011 (Frontier Star): Controversies have struck the blast that occurred in Gulistan-e-Jauhar area of Karachi killing one man Friday morning.
Controversies surround Gulistan-e-Jauhar blast
The Muslim Brotherhood, who decided on Wednesday to join in the protest, after saying they wouldn't, yesterday noted that they would set up an 'operations rooms' in Cairo and other governorates, in order to follow the 'Million Man Friday'.
Security 'to watch Egypt demo from afar'
Another one who is clearly finding it hard to get away from it all is council leader Joe Anderson's Man Friday and former leader of Rochdale council Richard Farnell, who - fresh from masterminding Labour's routing of the Lib-Dems in May and the response to government spending cuts - has taken a well-earned break in Madrid.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master
Elsewhere in the province, an unknown armed man Friday night opened fire on Afghan National Army troops in the Sabri district, injuring one soldier.
School destroyed; five injured in blast
My Man Friday on the next sunlounger was more philosophical about a few days' delay.
A TASTE OF THE CARIBBEEAN
The children were divided into three teams - Footprint, Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday - and designed the rafts themselves, together with paddles and flags.
Survival lessons make a splash; YOUNGSTERS LEARN ISLAND SKILLS
F1's Man Friday Nico Rosberg is 9-2 favourite to be fastest in tomorrow morning's first practice session, with Vettel and Button both 6-1 shots to top the times.
Germans expected to clean up; FORMULA ONE