• maverick •
Printable Version Pronunciation: mæ-vêr-ik • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. A calf or other animal that has left the herd and has not been branded, so that anyone who brands it can claim ownership. 2. A garrulous individualist, an iconoclast who lives by his or her own rules, posing a threat to others.
Notes: Maverick is a maverick word, a garrulous individual with no lexical kin. It may, however, be used 'as is' adjectivally, "Buck Shott is a maverick CEO who took a chance no one else would take to produce and market electric ice skates."
In Play: Although we generally use the term to refer to iconoclasts who pose some sort of threat, we owe a lot to mavericks. Galileo and Charles Darwin were among the scientific mavericks who grandly expanded our understanding of the modern world. Henry Ford started out as a maverick who revolutionized manufacturing. Those of us who have been around for a while remember Bret (James Garner) and Bart (Jack Kelly) Maverick on the US TV show Maverick, popular in the 1960's. They were cowboys who lived around the edge of the law, mavericks among the cowboy heroes of the time in their lack of courage.
Word History: The eponym of today's word is Texas cattleman, Samuel Maverick (1803-1870), who let the calves in his herd roam unbranded. Initially ranchers, 
who "adopted" them, simply referred to them as "Maverick's" but the term soon migrated into mavericks. An interesting side note: Sam's grandson, Maury Maverick, coined the word gobbledygook to describe bureaucratic doubletalk. While serving in the U.S. Congress (1935-1939), he explained that the word is based on the sound of turkeys (the flying kind) back in Texas, who were ". . . always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity." At the end of this gobble there is a sort of "gook".
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