Language is power, and Ronald McDonald is getting into a pissing match with the guardians of the English language.

McDonald’s Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word “McJob” removed from dictionaries — and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Glad to see the legal department at Mickey D’s HQ is working overtime. They might also want to target the OED’s definition of the prefix “Mc,” which applies “chiefly to nouns to form nouns with the sense ‘something that is of mass appeal, a standardized or bland variety.'”

As I type this, I’m wondering if the corporate goons have already found success: McDonald’s will be happy to know that Firefox’s spell-checker doesn’t recognize the word “McJob.” Then again, it doesn’t recognize “Hamburglar,” either. So let’s call it a draw. — MARK ASHLEY

McDonald’s Targets the English McLanguage [Spiegel Online International]
(Photo: iboy_daniel)

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