McPost

An article I ran across just now describes how McDonalds is "starting a petition" to have the definition of "McJob" in the Oxford English Dictionary changed. According to the article, the current OED definition is "an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects".

McDonald's complaints seem to rest on the premise that the role of a dictionary is to "define" words in a way such that, by the definition given the word in the dictionary, the word comes to have that meaning. Although this is a fairly prevalent view of the role of dictionary definitions (the dictionary as a set of commandments from on high), it is completely at odds with what lexicographers actually do, which is describe words as they are actually used.

When the folks that are responsible for putting words into the dictionary and giving them definitions do their work, they look for evidence of how the word they are defining is used. They don't impose a meaning on the word; they are simply describing the word's meaning as it is actually used.

So McDonald's can petition all it wants. The word will mean whatever people use it to mean, and the folks over at the OED will faithfully reflect that meaning in the definition(s) they give the word in their dictionary entry. Even if, as McDonald's senior VP David Fairhurst claims, "the current definition is extremely insulting" to the folks who work at McDonald's.

Now that I think of it, maybe McDonald's could take the "extremely insulting" claim seriously and attempt to persuade us that "McJobs" should be labeled as an epithet, making its use non-PC in the same way an "extremely insulting" racial epithet would be (These people should hire me - or rather, they should hire the unscrupulous but rich counterpart of me).

But looking further into the article, I'm afraid McDonald's is already sealing off this possible avenue of lexical revisionism:

Last year McDonald's tried to improve the image of its employment opportunities with the slogan: "McProspects - over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob."

Not sure they can complain at this point. Although maybe they could try to get away with a "reclaiming the word" sort of story - you know, we can say the word because its derogatory to us, but you can't - unless you're one of us too. Which reminds me - did you get a chance to fill out a McApplication?