gal Friday

noun

1. Older Use: Sometimes Offensive.,  a woman who acts as a general assistant in a business office or to an executive and has a wide variety of especially secretarial and clerical duties.

Sensitive Note

See girl.

Word History and Origins

Origin of gal Friday¹

First recorded in 1955–60; modeled on man Friday

Example Sentences

They treated him like he was their witness when, in fact, his testimony was pivotal to the prosecution The same with his former gal friday, Hope Hicks.

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“She became Norm’s sort of gal Friday and manager,” says Downey, the longtime SNL writer.

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I act as a sort of Gal Friday in my office.

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In an adjacent section called “New York Portrait,” we move indoors, with a 1940 Hopper sketch of a male office worker and a secretary sharing a tense, possibly steamy evening of overtime and a 1978 photo of Cindy Sherman impersonating a perky gal Friday whose only obvious eccentricity is wearing blackout glasses while she types.

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In less culturally sensitive times, Judi would have been described as Dave’s “Gal Friday,” but today she’s probably on the books as a “multiplatform content-generation facilitator,” because that’s what all newspaper jobs sound like.

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