Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News 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.

“Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons of accuracy. And it this case, they got it completely wrong,” Walt Riker, a Mickey D’s McSpokesman complained to the Associated Press. “It’s a complete disservice and incredibly demeaning to a terrific work force and a company that’s been a jobs and opportunity machine for 50 years.”

Boing Boing: McDonald’s: take “McJob” out of the dictionary McDonald’s is taking action to get the word “McJob” taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary. Let’s be clear: the job of a dictionary is to record language as it is spoken, and people clearly say “McJob” to mean a crummy job.

Trying to change dictionary definitions for political and image reasons is not an uncommon and something lexicographers are exposed to all the time. The nice thing about this particular exchange is that it illustrates how folk theories of language practice and reference influence both public debate and usage. Both Boing Boing and McDs have the same propositional frame of a dictionary: it records true meanings of words. However, BoingBoing relies on a usage-based theory of meaning (much more realistic linguistically and psychologically) whereas McDonalds evoke the objective reference theory of meaning whereby the dictionary’s job is to record the accurate referent of all lexical entries (which, of course, is linguistically untenable).

However, whatever the theoretical merits of either position, they are an example of a legitimate debate in which meanings are negotiated. Clearly, the dictionaries describe the usage of the Mc prefix (an interesting construction in itself) more or less accurately but McDonalds see their action as not purely descriptive but also evaluative. In that they are not completely unjustified. The word is rarely used descriptively outside certain evaluative contexts. A quick Google search reveals almost no unreflected usage in the top results (paradoxically triggering an ad from the McD personnel department). An inclusion in the dictionary can be used to legitimize the word and also its negative semantic prosody so that someone with the same theory of meaning as McD could later come and say: McDonald’s job conditions are awful - look even the dictionary says so.

The outcome of this will be very straightforward, the word will stay in the dictionaries and McDonald’s won’t be able to do much about it. However, it would be interesting to see whether they could subvert the meaning to over time change either its definition or at least semantic prosody.