You are what you eat … whatever that is

McD’s has seen their fair share of controversy through the ages, and their latest bumble in PR world comes from a McDonald’s effort to change the dictionary definition of “McJob” to reflect more positively on themselves, the leaders and all-around superelative of the fast food industry.

The Consumerist has the story, as does BrandCurve and others. Basically, the brass at Mickey D’s want to change the definition of McJob from:

a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement,

to

a job that is stimulating, rewarding … and offers skills that last a lifetime.

All together now — Puh-lease. Just because you sell hamburgers, doesn’t mean you get to manipulate the tongues and minds of the English-speaking world! And since when is there a ‘lexicon lobby’. Is this what corporations are doing now, spending their time and money to slowly implement Newspeak?

The best thing about our wacky language called English is that we are an open-source language. People can add things, manipulate definitions and combine words in new ways. Think about the definition of the word “queer” or “geek” 50 years ago — they’ve been completely co-oped. How about the fact that words like “blog” and “podcast” didn’t exist even 10 years ago, and now there commonplace. A great social experiment of the Internet age is UrbanDictionary.com, where people can submit new words and/or definitions to existing words.

This is a major faux-paz for McDonald’s as a brand and as a company. When brands create a language around their products and services, it has the potential to be absolute gold — think of those three little words Tall, Grande, and Venti — but when it goes wrong in this manner, it just makes us think of the true black magic that goes into marketing. This is the sort of thing that makes consumers rebel, makes them unfaithful, and makes them distrust a brand.

Luckily, they don’t own us yet. So let’s rebel by adding the prefix ‘Mc’ to all sorts of words and phrases, but in the negative connotation. Perhaps this sort of PR fumble will come to be known as McRelations. Or when definitions are manipulated, they will be known as McWords. I dunno, you try some. I’m done for now.

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