Living in a 'McWorld'

The folks at McDonald's have a beef with the folks at Merriam-Webster, whose latest dictionary records the neologism "mcjob,"defining it as a "low-paying job that requires little skill and offers little opportunity for advancement." Mcjob thus claims its place alongside mcmansion, mcpaper and other etymological witnesses to the phenomenal success of the hamburgerer-in-chief.

Whether it is a favorable or friendly witness is of course questionable, and James Cantalupo, the Chief Executive Officer of McDonald's, has issued a formal protest and a demand that the word be expunged from the lexicographical record. Spitting against the winds of semasiology in this fashion is an exercise in fatuity that perhaps provides the materials for a mccolumn. For though global corporations own or control a very great deal, they neither own nor control the English language.

In 1970, the Grove Press was advertising one of its bestselling books ("Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher" by Jim Haskins) with a blurb adopted from one of the early reviews. "This book is like a weapon . . . it is the real thing." This advertisement was drawn to the attention of the legal department of the Coca-Cola Corporation, which then wrote to Grove Press informing them that Coke, their registered trademark, was actually "the real thing," and instructing them to advertise "Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher" without trespassing on those pages of the dictionary that were wholly owned subsidiaries of the bottling giant. Richard Seaver, responding for Grove Press, conceded that he could "fully understand that the public might be confused by our use of the expression, and mistake a book by a Harlem schoolteacher for a six-pack of Coca-Cola." He offered to write a memo to all booksellers to put them on the qui vive for customers likely to conflate social criticism with soda water. When the leaked exchange of letters became the set text for a question about irony on the AP English exam, the soft-drink moguls ended up with egg, perhaps even Egg McMuffin, all over their corporate face. Irony is apparently not a mode much practiced in lawschool, more's the tort.

Back to mcwords, they form a subset of the English lexicon derived from personal names. Generally the source is a surname, but on occasion "Christian" or given names lie behind them. It is no doubt my constitutional hypersensitivity that leads me to lament the semantic development of "john" as (1) a toilet and (2) a prostitute's customer. I won't even mention such unfortunate derivates of the "jack" family as jackass, jackknife, jack off, hijack, etc. There is no absolute rule in this matter, but the empirical fact is that most such words tilt toward the pejorative. The same is true for derivations from surnames, though there are rare exceptions. The word "macadam," though now falling into obsolescence, long denoted the surface of roads made of uniformly graded gravel, tightly compacted, and later, of gravel compacted in asphalt composition. John McAdam, the inventor of the original process, was a Scottish engineer of the early part of the nineteenth century. Macadam was an excellent industrial innovation with markedly progressive social implications. Its inventor was one hell of a john or, as we say today, a brilliant engineer.

But most mcwords are not so upbeat. Their paradigm might be "chauvinism," which used to mean an exaggerated or offensive patriotism and now has been generalized as "prejudiced belief in the superiority of one's own gender, group, or kind." The father of chauvinism was supposedly one Nicolas Chauvin, a Napoleonic soldier, whose obnoxiously proclaimed belief in French superiority was perhaps a little more plausible when backed up by the Polish lancers than when backed up by the hairdo of Dominique de Villepin. To stay the course in our same historical period I would next invoke the celebrated Edinburgh murderers, Burke and Hare. Though pikers (from Pike County) by the standards of modern mass murder, in their day these fellows made quite a name for themselves by creating corpses to sell for anatomical dissection. William Burke's preferred modus operandi was to smother his victims with a heavy bolster. To this day the verb "burke" means to smother or stifle, literally or metaphorically. The analogous neologism "bork"(verb and noun), on the other hand, derives not from the perpetrator but the victim, Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987, was stifled during highly partisan confirmation hearings of questionable seemliness. The Republican Senate then borked numerous Clinton nominees, and Senate Democrats are attempting to bork three of Bush's candidates even as I write.

This brings us back to the executive suite at Hamburger Headquarters Central. Just as people who live in glass houses shouldn't, people named Cantalupo perhaps tempt fate when they essay to bowdlerize (from Thomas Bowdler, d. 1825) the Merriam-Webster dictionary for purposes of corporate public relations. The pseudo-vegetarian monicker deceives no one. I see a possible future for an English noun canatalupo meaning "silly CEO-speak" with a folk etymology "looped or loopy cant." And as bilingualism slowly spreads throughout the land it could be an equally effective Spanglish verb of the –ar conjugation, meaning "hablar maclengua, blather." And you can stick that in your Funk 'n Wagnalls. John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.