Redefining the McJob

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Normally, if a controversial international babillion dollar corporation is seeking to change the language, it would be cause for alarm. The idea smacks of corporate, Orwellian mind control tactics. Alarmist outcry seems justified.

But if it’s McDonald’s trying to rebrand the word McJob, I say fuck it. Go with it.

Currently, the word is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, the Bible for word usage and coinage, as "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector." The British branch of McDonald’s is preparing a public petition to get the definition changed, continuing a year-old effort to change public perception of McEmployment. Similar actions were taken by their American corporate counterparts in 2003, to no avail.

According to the OED, the word was first used in print in 1986 by the Washington Post. Of course, it gained a lot of cultural currency when it was used in Douglas Coupland’s 1991 debut novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, a document that has aged about as well as a Roxette cassingle. As much as I honestly do like Coupland’s writing, that initially over-praised book is so culturally irrelevant now it’s fairly repellent. Thinking on it now, I’d like to throttle the book’s rootless, culturally alienated characters and ask them how 9-11 affected their middle class ennui.

Is the term McJob as anachronistic as the rest of the book, though? I think so. A Nexis search for instances of the word “McJob” in news articles in the last two years revealed that while the word was often used in the OED sense, mostly it was used as short hard for jobs at fast food joints, most often at McDonald’s. (A lot of articles were about Kevin Smith, which is interesting, but not surprising.)

There’s no way to quantify how McJob or any other slang word is used colloquially. Still, I’m pretty sure the last time I heard the word come out of someone’s mouth, 4 Non Blondes was playing on a top 40 radio station. I

The amateur cultural gatekeepers scurrying over Wikipedia apparently don’t give a shit about the term either – much of the entry for McJob is a defense of burger flipping gigs, including quotes from former McDonald’s CEO James Cantalupo.

We should let McDonald’s have its stupid word. In return, we’ll keep “burger flipping,” “dead-end jobs” and the knowledge that working at McDonald’s sucks.

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