McLanguage Meets the Dictionary:
McDonald’s wants Merriam-Webster to take its McJob and shove it. McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo is steamed that the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘McJob’ as low-paying, requiring little skill, and providing little opportunity for advancement. Three years ago The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ran a similar definition, and The Oxford English Dictionary includes ‘unstimulating’ in the mix of descriptors branding McJobs as dead-end.
McCEO isn’t a McJob — but asking “Would you like fries with that?”…yeah, that’s a McJob.
Jim Cantalupo isn’t the first person to object to what he feels is bad language in the dictionary, nor is he the first to tell lexicographers how to define their words. For example, in 1872 A.S. Solomons protested G. & C. Merriam’s definition of the verb “jew” as “to cheat.” And in 1997 a grass-roots protest insisted that Merriam-Webster drop the word “nigger” from the dictionary. The NAACP joined that protest, calling for the dictionary to remove any reference to race in the word’s definition.
Remove race from the definition?
Wildly successful business phenomena like McDonald’s have a way of working their way into our language as well as our culture. In the early 20th century, Coca-Cola sued to prevent the marketing of other drinks with “cola” in their name, winning judgments against upstarts like Chero-Cola, Clio-Cola, and El-Cola but losing against Cherry-Cola, Dixie-Cola, and Koke, all of them long gone. Coke also lost its bid to prevent 7-Up from calling itself “the Un-Cola.” One result of Atlanta-based Coke’s domination of the cola industry is that “coke” and “co’ cola” have become generic terms in the South for any soft drink. Another soft drink, Moxie, won a suit against the competitor Noxie, only to see “moxie” enter the language as an ordinary word meaning energy, guts, or chutzpah. Shredded wheat, thermos, and zipper all began as trademarked terms that morphed into everyday words as well.
I always wondered where “moxie” came from.
When I crawl into the airport early Saturday morning, I plan on asking the girl behind the McDonald’s counter for Eggs McMuffin:
Ever eager to burnish its public image, the McDonald’s Corporation once hired a public-relations firm to ascertain the correct plural of the Egg McMuffin. Perhaps they were hoping to gain approval for Eggs McMuffin, on the analogy of the more upmarket eggs Benedict. But that quest went nowhere. As far as I know, the company never ruled on what eaters of the Egg McMuffin should order if they want more than one.
Baron makes a point: “Dictionaries don’t tell us how to use our words, they describe how we use them.”